What will tomorrow’s hospital look like?
What are the major innovations that will transform, for the better, the relationship between practitioners and patients, whether for greater effectiveness or greater acceptability of treatment protocols? Technologies of the future: how do we detect them, co-build them and bring them to life?
These questions are one of the reasons for being of the TransMedTech Institute (iTMT) in Montreal, an institution created in 2017 under the leadership of Professor Carl-Éric Aubin PhD. On the one hand, iTMT’s mission is to develop and deploy innovative medical technologies, drawing on the key players in its broad ecosystem, with the aim of meeting existing or emerging needs in the healthcare field.
To achieve this, TransMedTech draws in particular on TKM’s expertise in technology transfer. Its analysis tools make it possible to carry out in-depth positioning and techno-economic feasibility studies on projects being considered for maturation within the institute.
A cross-perspective on the hospital of the future with Marie-Pierre Faure PhD, Innovation & Living Lab Director at the TransMedTech Institute, and Christophe Lecante, founding CEO of TKM.
Marie-Pierre Faure, could you tell us about TransMedTech’s approach and purpose?
Marie-Pierre Faure: “Officially launched in 2017, the TransMedTech Institute is a transdisciplinary, open-collaboration initiative that brings together entrepreneurs, researchers, healthcare professionals, experts, but also users, patients, industry players, and students.
The institute aims to develop innovative medical technologies in order to meet the needs of the healthcare field and train the next generation of the medical-technology sector. TransMedTech was born from an initiative led by Polytechnique Montréal in collaboration with four other founding institutions: CHU Sainte-Justine, the Université de Montréal, CHUM and the Jewish General Hospital of Montreal, as well as around thirty other partners.
Three other institutions also joined in 2023: HEC Montréal, the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal and the Montreal Heart Institute.
Following the TransMedTech Institute’s Living Lab user-centered approach, a first step consists of producing a current state of the art, validating market segments, and defining the regulatory pathway in order to confirm the viability of the solution proposed by the team led by the innovators. To do this, we use the tools developed by TKM.
To date, more than 140 collaborative projects have benefited from our support using the TransMedTech method, with close to CAD 40 million invested.”
What are the major trends you observe in the healthcare field?
Marie-Pierre Faure : “The major trend right now is a paradigm shift. The hospital of the future is increasingly embracing the notion of point of care, where care can be delivered more effectively and directly, right where the patient is.
For the patient-citizen, this evolution will mean more accessible, personalized and dedicated care and services.
Implementing the hospital of the future involves the emergence of new technologies, notably digital health, with its many challenges and issues such as data sharing, interoperability, security and ethics.
It will be essential to take into account the diversity of the population and the environments served, as well as individual specificities and disparities between communities. We will also need to consider the challenges of these new technologies’ adoption by the various stakeholders, particularly in terms of training, changes in practice and uptake.”
What is TKM’s view of these issues and of the hospital of the future?
Christophe Lecante: “Listening to Marie-Pierre Faure, I can’t help but think of a project we worked on in 2017 on the concept of a “Caring Home” with a Quebec manufacturing company in the construction sector. Its CEO wanted to multiply his company’s innovation capabilities and propose innovative solutions to rethink the living space in service of its occupants.
People’s needs evolve over time, sometimes temporarily, for example with the arrival of a child, an accident, or convalescence, or even chronically as they age. As a result, the field of innovation is very broad. It is easy to lose one’s way and, ultimately, fall back on uninspired solutions.
By providing a complete overview of this topic, whether in terms of research, public policy, technology, or start-ups, TKM made it possible to highlight the direct links with the healthcare world and, in particular, with the hospital setting, on matters such as the relationship between patients and medical staff, remote monitoring, emergency-room overcrowding, and chronic-disease monitoring…
It quickly became clear that this concept of a caring home partly echoed that of a caring hospital, designed and organized around its patients and citizens. This realization, made possible by this “upstream monitoring” work, made it possible to imagine, very early on, highly exciting collaboration and innovation frameworks that broke with conventional ways of thinking.
In other words, this monitoring allowed the company to think about its innovation ecosystem in an infinitely more open and effective way, to take a real step to the side, and to quickly gather expressions of interest, then launch collaborations in record time.
The TransMedTech Institute now uses our monitoring and analysis tools to carry out exactly this kind of upstream analysis, in order to validate, de-risk and accelerate the innovation processes proposed to it by the practitioners and researchers working day to day in Montreal’s hospitals.”
Will the hospital of the future be a caring hospital?
Christophe Lecante: “Yes, I believe so and I hope so! The hospital of the future is a hospital centered on the patient-citizen, who becomes a partner in their own care and in research. It is a hospital that opens up to the city and that focuses first and foremost on innovation with strong societal impact, on verified therapeutic added value, and that becomes an essential driver of inclusivity.
This is the ambition that the TransMedTech Institute carries, and which it has translated into the heart of its support processes.”
Is the technology mature enough to achieve this?
Marie-Pierre Faure: “Today, technology is no longer the problem. The challenge is using tech to meet needs. We need to manage to integrate these new tools into a care pathway, smoothly and securely, for all stakeholders.
That’s what we try to do at TransMedTech: we are sometimes presented with incredible technologies, but ones that are difficult for a user to adopt as they stand. That’s where we have to make a selection. Hence the idea of involving patient-citizens as early as possible in the co-development of these innovations.”
Christophe Lecante: “This is why the concept of Value Based Health Care — which covers developing a care system based on demonstrating added value in the eyes of the patient — is crucial. We can imagine wonderful technologies from a technical and scientific point of view, but ones that could miss the ‘usage’ dimension and prove very problematic for the patient.”
How can we make sure a technology truly fits the patient’s use?
Marie-Pierre Faure : “We are supporting, for example, a project aiming to equip 300 patients in retirement homes with connected watches. The major difficulty is preventing patients from ripping off this watch. The project leaders are therefore looking into the possibility of using connected clothing instead, which is more tolerable.
As this example shows, the goal is to clearly define the use, depending on the type of beneficiary. Between a pediatric patient — at home with their parents — a teenager wearing a restrictive brace for scoliosis, an adult in post-traumatic rehabilitation equipped with virtual reality, or elderly people with dementia cared for by nurses…
Patients’ reality and needs are very different. It is not only therapeutic effectiveness, but also a treatment’s or device’s ability to fit as well as possible into the patient’s life that must take priority in the approach. This integration has an impact on the effectiveness of the medicine.”
All these questions ultimately come back to the question of technology acceptability…
Marie-Pierre Faure : “There are technological issues, certainly, but not only those. There are challenges of social transposition, cultural change, scaling up, shifts in usage and adapting devices.
The whole challenge is to make devices less invasive, less restrictive and easier for the patient, so that the medical device blends into the life of the patient and of the practitioners.”
How is it that the shared medical record still isn’t a reality?
Christophe Lecante : “The shared medical record is one of the central tools, and has been at the heart of debates for many years, when it comes to enabling and facilitating this cross-cutting coordination.
Questions of data confidentiality and security, of how data is processed and used, are complex and involve a large number of players, with significant human, societal and ethical issues at stake.
Paradoxically, people have no problem wearing connected devices for sports, or for managing calendars, cars, or owning connected phones. We accept giving up part of what is private to us if we find an immediate benefit in it: tracking my performance or my training plan, sharing my calendar with my teams, greater efficiency in my urban travel, etc.
But as soon as you touch on healthcare, everything legitimately becomes more complex. There is a real political topic, a real debate to be had, to study the risk/benefit balance of connected medical solutions and, above all, how the data collected is used.”
How does TransMedTech help move things in the right direction?
Marie-Pierre Faure : “Through its development work, TransMedTech wants to invent this hospital of the future, this caring hospital, where the patient-citizen is a stakeholder. In partnership with TKM, TransMedTech aims to show the right path, since potential pitfalls can be detected very early in the innovation-maturation process.”
What does TKM contribute to TransMedTech’s innovation path?
Christophe Lecante : “The tools offered by TKM allow TransMedTech’s teams to carry out extensive intelligence monitoring, on a global scale. This monitoring work makes it possible to validate that each project selected and supported by the Institute is genuinely relevant and innovative.
The literature review also makes it possible to ensure there is added value to the project and to verify that there is indeed a possibility for commercial exploitation, by removing any doubt, particularly on questions of industrial property, and this on a global scale.”
TransMedTech, in partnership with TKM, is an essential player, both from an operational and a methodological standpoint, in service of research and innovation for more inclusive precision health.
The collective-intelligence approach, with the Living Lab method, is a key factor in properly addressing the question of translating invention into market deployment.
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