WITH THE percentage of Asia’s ageing population growing at a dramatic rate and set to triple by the year 2050, there is a pressing need to explore ways and means of dealing with the concomitant social and medical problems such an increase will inevitably bring.

Health authorities and hospitals are already changing their approaches to providing services to meet the needs of this greying population at an affordable price and they’ve now been joined by Philips, which recently opened a brand new Asia Pacific Centre in Singapore. The centre, which will manage Philips’ business throughout the APAC region, will also serve as a showcase of innovations and a research and training venue.

“Not only in Singapore but also in the region at large, this APAC Centre will be the powerhouse in the field of healthcare technologies. Our aim is to research and co-create with partners in the region,” says Ronal de Jong, vice-president & chief market leader for the Dutch company.

He adds that the world faces significant challenges with an ageing population, particularly with respect to the increase in chronic diseases and global resource constraints that limit the access to quality healthcare. The new and more highly integrated care delivery models enabled by health technologies and new business models will be vital in responding to this trend.

“The way we have delivered healthcare in the past no longer applies. We need innovations in products, technology and in the way we work with partners and customers, with hospitals, doctors and nurses, while making sure that we don’t spend 80 per cent of the global healthcare budget on diagnosis and treatment on people who are already sick as we do today. If we are to be effective, we must shift our resources to prevention and early detection,” he says.

Philips notes with satisfaction the increasing interest consumers are showing in engaging in their own health and well being and the rise in home rather than hospital care.

Digitisation technology, de Jong notes, makes it possible to apply solutions as society makes the switch from hospital to home care.

Philips first established a presence in Singapore in 1951 and started its business operations there in 1972 before naming the city state as its Asia-Pacific headquarters overseeing business from Japan, South Korea to Australia and New Zealand but excluding China.

The new APAC Centre follows the Royal Philips’ decision earlier this year to splits its major businesses into two companies, Philips Lighting Solutions and Philips HealthTech.

The six-storey building, one of the three Philips learning centres, is located in Toa Payoh and is spread over 38,000 square metres, thus providing ample space to house the 600 staff behind Philips’ innovation and design expertise and business-creation capabilities.

The original Singapore centre was set up in 2006 and has so far trained more than 5,000 professionals from across the region. It offers extensive theoretical and hands-on training for doctors, nurses, medical engineers and service providers through the use of expensive high-end machines.

The APAC centre also houses a co-creator lab where Philips will work with partners to create viable, leading-edge solutions that address today’s and tomorrow’s healthcare challenges.

The Health Continuum Space, which has yet to be finished, will allow researchers to simulate the healthcare scenario from a mock hospital, all the way to patient’s home.

The centre also has a Continuous Care Monitoring Room where healthcare professionals remotely monitor the health of home-based patients through integrated technologies that support communications between patients and professionals, and a sleep and respiratory care area fitted with a sleep monitoring room simulator.

“The Pulse”, as Philips Unified Landscape for Social Engagement is known for short, is also housed here and allows Philips to monitor what is going on in each country by observing, via online users statistics, the most popular word Googled each day as well as how often the word Philips is mentioned online.