Future trend "Hospital@Home": BFH strengthens digital competencies

For years now, the Swiss healthcare system has been under huge pressure from rising healthcare costs and a significant shortage of skilled workers. To combat these challenges, thoughts have turned to ways in which innovative healthcare solutions can be used to help shorten hospital stays. Under the buzzword “Hospital@Home”, healthcare organisations have been developing pilot projects – some of which have already become an element of standard care.

In Switzerland, this topic is still relatively new, with current invoicing models and collaboration structures representing key issues. Looking ahead, however, it is clear to all forward-looking stakeholders that the future of healthcare will be very different from what we are seeing today.

The increasing role of digitalisation in society is opening up new technical possibilities in the area of healthcare as elsewhere. Examples of innovation that will play a key role in this are new medical sensors, the intelligent use of Internet-of-Things technology and the convergence of data from different sources with subsequent data analysis using machine learning.

With its Department of Health, technical disciplines of medical informatics and medical technology within the Department of Engineering and Information Technology and the BFH Centre for Health Technologies, BFH has the necessary expertise not only to get to the heart of medical, procedural and technical issues, but also to facilitate a greater depth and breadth of knowledge in this new area. This is aided by the outstanding networking of its lecturers in these special fields with stakeholders from Swiss healthcare institutions, such as the Swiss Center for Design and Health (SCDH) with its future Living Lab, a project in which BFH is involved.

BFH’s medical informatics proficiency will be further strengthened in early August with the appointment of Prof. Dr Sang-II Kim and Prof. Dr med. Gert Krummrey. Prof. Dr Sang-II Kim previously occupied the position of Head of Digital Transformation at the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) and has over 25 years’ experience in the digitalisation of healthcare, while Prof. Dr med. Gert Krummrey was most recently Head of Digital Transformation and an emergency doctor at the Insel Group’s University Emergency Centre in Bern.