Dirk F de Korne is currently the Deputy Director, Medical Innovation & Care Transformation at KK Women’s & Children’s Hospital (KKH). He also holds a position as Adjunct Assistant Professor at Duke-NUS Medical School Singapore and Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. In KKH, he is responsible for the hospitals’ overall innovation strategy and execution, including the alignment and facilitaiton of initatives and projects pertaining to cross-departments, multi-disciplinary collaborations towards patient service integration with relevent stakeholders. 

Since 2003, he has focused on quality improvement and organizational strategy in hospital care. His implementation, research, and teaching work focusses on understanding the diffusion of quality and patient safety innovations and include business process and systems design, telehealth, human factors & ergonomics, and performance benchmarking. Before his move to Singapore in 2013, he worked as Quality & Safety Consultant at The Rotterdam Eye Hospital. As lecturer he has been teaching health care quality and organizational sciences as well supervised bachelor and master graduates. He holds a MSc in Health Policy & Management from Erasmus University Rotterdam and a PhD in Public Health from University of Amsterdam

Today’s hospitals are rich and complex socio-technical environments where technology and human actions are closely interwoven and patient’s health outcomes are co-dependent on the success of this interaction. Moreover, it is increasingly recognized that the patient journey takes mostly place outside of the hospital. As medical and nursing care becomes more technology-dependent, many fear that sensors, robotics, digitalization, machine learning and 

artificial intelligence will take the humanity out of health care. Do we need to worry? In this session, it is argued how ‘high tech’ can perform repetitive and redundant activities to enable nursing and medical staff to focus on ‘high touch’. Examples are taken from various area’s of women’s and children’s care, including smart health video consultation, pregancy chatbots, and real-time notifications for hand hygiene performance. If applied properly, new technologies could optimize patient health outcomes while enhancing nursing joy and career perspectives.