Expanding healthcare access: The imperative for new care pathways
- By Philips
- October 11 2025
- 8 min read
While barriers to cardiac care vary across health systems, common systemic contributors include the overutilization of telemetry beds, a shortage of cardiovascular specialists and nurses, emergency department (ED) congestion, prolonged hospital stays and fragmented coordination between primary care providers and cardiology services. These inefficiencies not only impede throughput but also reduce the quality and consistency of care. Central to resolving these challenges is the establishment of enterprise-wide cardiac workflows that place patients at the center of care.
At-a-glance:
- Barriers to cardiac care stem from overused telemetry beds, shortages of specialists and nurses, ED congestion, prolonged stays and poor coordination between primary and cardiology services.
- Philips cardiac monitoring solutions can help alleviate these pressures with a fully integrated, end-to-end solution that supports patient care inside and outside of hospital.
- Our cardiac monitoring solutions, data management platform and virtual care services help administrators find new care pathways and widen access to care.
Expanding access to cardiac care is a vital strategy for promoting health equity. This approach aligns with another evolution in care delivery – the future of healthcare is not hospital-centric, but patient-centric. We need to reimagine how we identify, manage and monitor patients, especially those with chronic cardiac conditions, outside of the hospital setting.
Extending health systems’ reach: Four critical steps
As we envision it, extending care through a health ecosystem requires health systems to focus their efforts on these domains.
- Make actionable data available wherever and whenever care happens
- Adopt a forward-thinking, flexible strategy, including embracing AI
- Follow a Start, Build, Scale framework
- Create an environment for cross-disciplinary collaboration
Making care available wherever care happens
As healthcare becomes more and more distributed across care settings, connecting data across settings and data sources will become even more important. This requires a new playbook that will focus on the following areas:
- Data quality and reliability: To empower clinicians with the best possible information to make decisions, they need anytime, anywhere access to their patients’ EKG and ECG history. The ultimate goal is to provide clear, contextual and actionable insights, but this can only be achieved if the underlying data is reliable, consistent and well-organized.
- Data accessibility: Today, the real challenge lies in ensuring that the data is accessible in ways that support clinical decision-making. This is especially critical when dealing with ECG data, which can often be overwhelming without the right tools to process and organize it.
- Data transparency: We believe that health systems need – and deserve – full access to their data, including clinical data (specific measurements from devices and diagnostic-level data), operational data (who the patient is and details about their touchpoints with the health system) and deep scientific data (appropriate measurement is captured and available for use in research, which can be useful in population health efforts).
Creating an environment for cross-disciplinary collaboration
Optimizing cardiac care means empowering primary care to play a more decisive role in the front end of the patient journey. By equipping primary care providers with tools to prescribe cardiac monitoring solutions, health systems can improve triage accuracy, reduce avoidable ED utilization and streamline specialty referrals. This approach enables primary care to rule in or rule out cardiology needs early, ensuring that when referrals do occur, they’re clinically justified and supported by pre-collected cardiac data.
For health system leaders, this translates into better capacity management, lower operational strain on EDs and more equitable access to timely cardiac care. It’s a strategic shift that not only can improve patients’ experience and outcomes, but that also aligns with broader enterprise goals around efficiency.
Follow a Start, Build, Scale framework
Once hospitals define their objectives around new at-home care models, the next step is ensuring they can successfully deliver on their goals. This requires alignment across clinical, operational and technological teams.
A modular approach – building flexible, scalable and adaptable solutions based on the needs of both patients and clinicians – can help health systems progressively achieve their goals.
- Hospitals can begin by focusing on fewer devices, services and vendors to simplify integration and reduce complexity. The initial benefit of this approach is fewer interfaces, reducing training requirements and enabling staff to become proficient with consistent workflows.
- Once a basic platform is in place, trust has been built and initial outcomes are measured, the focus shifts to expanding the scope of the model while continuing to refine the workflow and technology integration. The goal is to build on the foundation established in the first scenario, incorporating feedback from the launch to scale adoption.
- In the Scale scenario, hospitals are operating with a comprehensive view of patient care and outcomes. The goal is to stay ahead of market demands, ensuring that they are prepared for the future of healthcare and are optimizing the value from their cardiac monitoring and virtual care initiatives.
Adopt a forward-thinking, flexible strategy, including embracing AI
The exponential growth of data generated across the cardiac care continuum, from inpatient encounters, wearable technologies and clinical information systems, has opened new avenues for health systems to transition from reactive care toward predictive, preventive and data-informed models. By harnessing this expanding volume of data, healthcare organizations are increasingly positioned to anticipate clinical needs, stratify risk and proactively intervene.
To realize this potential, health systems can adopt advanced analytics and AI capabilities. A foundational step involves the implementation of cardiovascular informatics platforms that leverage AI to synthesize data across domains and to generate patient-specific and population-wide insights.
In parallel, the integration of open AI architectures within the Philips platform enables health systems to deploy custom developed AI solutions or integrate third-party applications, creating a unified yet flexible ecosystem for continuous innovation. The incorporation of wearable diagnostic devices into this framework further enhances timely patient monitoring and allows for longitudinal data capture outside of traditional care settings.
Conclusion
For this transformation to succeed, health systems will need to partner with technology providers to build and implement solutions that are flexible, scalable and adaptable to future care pathways that incorporate advancements in AI and at-home monitoring. In doing so, they can create a healthcare system that is not only more efficient and sustainable but also more equitable, ensuring that patients receive the care they need when and where they need it most.
Expanding healthcare access: The imperative for new care pathways
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