The Impact of COVID-19: A Case Study from ResMed
ResMed’s overarching guiding principle is preservation of life and this has governed every decision we have made as a business through the pandemic. Our priorities have been to ensure the health and safety of our people, build and distribute as many ventilators as we can, support healthcare professionals in the front-line and bring to market digital health technologies that save lives and keep people safe.
In a dynamic and evolving global landscape, we had to radically transform the way we operate, transitioning our teams to remote working, and implementing new shift patterns and social distancing layouts in our warehouse to ensure continuity of supply. These changes took place as we faced the immense pressures of record-high demand on our products and services, and I am deeply humbled by the extraordinary levels of fortitude and agility that our ResMed teams have shown. Perhaps one of the great frustrations from social distancing is being unable to shake their hands and thank them in person for everything they have done.
Faced with the global surge in demand for life-saving ventilators, our focus has been to rapidly evolve our entire global production and supply chain to help healthcare systems around the world treat as many patients as possible. Increasing our manufacturing capacity three-fold has enabled us to deliver thousands of ventilators and consumables to support the national response plans of the UK Government and the devolved nations, in addition to our continued commitments to existing customers. We have strived to leverage our expertise and collective knowledge to offer ongoing expert advice and ventilation training to a multitude of healthcare professionals through virtual tools, and have made available a comprehensive set of resources on our dedicated COVID-19 microsite.
Digitally-enabled healthcare pathways have taken centre stage in the fight both during and after the height of the pandemic. We have noticed renewed interest from the NHS to adopt health technologies that enable out-of-hospital care for patients, reduce their length of hospital stay, and optimise service efficiencies and patient outcomes. Tele-monitoring, in particular, meets this brief as it creates an extra layer of safety through distancing between the care provider and the patient, and ensures that patients with existing conditions are well supported while freeing-up valuable clinical time. With this in mind, we accelerated the launch of AirView for Ventilation in Europe by several months to help clinicians remotely monitor ventilated patients in their home. Our AirView ecosystem has over 13 million patients and holds more than six billion nights of sleep and respiratory medical data in the cloud.
In the UK, we also ramped-up our offering of data-enabled services available to customers, provided by our team of trained clinicians, many coming from the NHS themselves. Maybe one of the few positive outcomes from this awful crisis is that it has brought to the forefront the importance of digital health and its many benefits in optimising service and cost efficiencies for healthcare systems and ultimately improving patient outcomes.
Finally, we have to commend the pivotal role of the ABHI in representing the interest of health technology manufacturers with UK Government stakeholders. As one of the many examples of their broad impact, their intervention helped us to better understand which NHS sites received deliveries of ResMed ventilators from the nationally procured stock, and enabled us to proactively reach out to front-line workers and provide them with training and support. This really demonstrates the positive effect ABHI is having not only on industry, but also in supporting the NHS and COVID-19 patients care. As we look to the challenges ahead, the UK HealthTech industry is in safe hands.
Antoine Valterio, Country Manager UK/Ireland, ResMed