Philips CEO calls for shift to ‘servant technology’ mindset in healthcare

There is a huge opportunity to redesign care around patients and those caring for patients, and ensure technology and data help carers rather than burden them, according to Roy Jakobs, CEO Philips.

Speaking at ViVE, the annual health technology conference, March 26-29, he described how the many different technologies and the flood of data in healthcare are often overwhelming clinicians, doctors, nurses and other carers, contributing to their leaving the industry at a time when there’s already a shortage of carers. He urged innovators and technologists to prioritize making technology and the use of data easier, simpler and more intuitive.

“Let’s shift our thinking from technology-led to carers- and patient-led,” he said. “Let’s not think about what technology can do but what it can do for the people that use it.”

Jakobs argued that COVID-19 has permanently changed the healthcare industry and said that the industry now needs to choose how to move forward.

“We have a choice to make, and what I want to ask you is that we choose to focus our efforts and our energy on the carers and patients, that we redesign how we innovate into an open-systems mindset, that we make interoperability a standard, that we think responsibly about the data that we set free.”

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