21 Ways Medical Digital Twins Will Transform Healthcare

The field of digital twins is expanding rapidly based on advances in real-time data feeds, machine learning, and augmented reality/virtual reality, according to a July 4, 2021, VentureBeat article. The result: digital twins could dramatically shift how providers diagnose and treat patients and ultimately help realign incentives for improving health.

Today’s medical digital twins represent next-level advances in simulation. Digital twins can create useful models based on information from wearable devices, omics, and patient records to connect the dots across processes that span patients, doctors, and healthcare organizations, as well as drug and device manufacturers. The healthcare industry is increasingly adopting digital twins to improve personalized medicine, healthcare organization performance, and new medicines and devices.

Digital twins show tremendous promise in helping healthcare organizations improve efficiency and care delivery by modeling operations and discovering variations in business processes. One example is the GE HealthCare Command Center, a major initiative to virtualize hospitals and test the impact of various decisions on changes in overall organizational performance. The Command Center includes modules for evaluating changes in operational strategy, capacities, staffing, and care delivery models to objectively determine which actions to take. For example, GE developed modules to estimate the impact of bed configurations on care levels, optimize surgical schedules, improve facility design, and optimize staff levels. This allows managers to test various ideas without having to run a pilot.

Dozens of healthcare organizations are already using GE’s platform.