{"id":234201,"date":"2026-01-08T12:38:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T12:38:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/234201\/"},"modified":"2026-01-08T12:38:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T12:38:07","slug":"how-virtual-replicas-of-hospitals-and-patients-can-transform-irish-healthcare-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/234201\/","title":{"rendered":"How virtual replicas of hospitals and patients can transform Irish healthcare \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Picture the scene in the emergency department of a typical acute Irish hospital<\/a> at 10pm on a Friday.<\/p>\n

Ambulance crews deliver the injured and unwell for treatment. Triage nurses race to prioritise those in need of medical attention; porters transfer patients from the ED up to the wards. <\/p>\n

Multidisciplinary medical teams work to examine, order tests, diagnose, prescribe and treat. It\u2019s hectic, the medics progress through the queue but, at times, delays are extensive. Last year, Ireland\u2019s emergency departments recorded a total of almost 1.58 million attendances \u2013 up 8 per cent on 2023 activity.<\/p>\n

Healthcare professionals constantly analyse their processes and strive for greater efficiency. Now, new tools are emerging that can analyse processes in ways that don\u2019t interfere with the work at hand, crunching vast data to offer better solutions.<\/p>\n

Amid much conversation about AI<\/a> and how it can best be applied in all fields of life and work, the concept digital twinning \u2013 which has been applied with great success to everything from designing an aeroplane to monitoring the efficiency of a power station \u2013 has significant potential for use in healthcare. <\/p>\n

A digital twin is a highly detailed virtual copy of something real \u2013 a machine, a hospital, a human organ, even an entire healthcare system. It\u2019s continuously updated with real-world data to reflect the behaviour of the original, allowing you to test, tweak and explore \u201cwhat-if\u201d scenarios without disturbing the real thing.<\/p>\n

Engineers use them to see how a plane engine performs in a storm. In healthcare, they model how a treatment, workflow or policy might play out in practice. Just as a hurricane tests a plane more than turbulence, a pandemic tests healthcare systems.<\/p>\n

\"DrDr Mary Coghlan. <\/p>\n

Digital twins let you model these extraordinary events through hospitals, supply chains and communities \u2013 before they happen. They\u2019re particularly valuable in healthcare, where change is high-stakes and expensive.<\/p>\n

Rolling out a new initiative takes years and potentially hundreds of millions of euros. <\/p>\n

From hospital systems to heart valves<\/p>\n

Digital twins accelerate a return on investment. By testing potential reforms virtually first, they help target limited funding to interventions most likely to deliver real benefits.<\/p>\n

For example, Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UK) built a digital twin of two hospitals to model emergency and elective journeys in real time. This enabled the hospital to simulate operational changes \u2013 such as ward closures, staffing adjustments or patient surges \u2013 in a risk-free environment and test interventions to see which would have the greatest impact on bed utilisation and queue times and reducing bottlenecks.<\/p>\n

Digital twins are also increasingly being used to provided more personalised medical information. For example, HeartFlow technology can generate a 3D model of a patient\u2019s coronary arteries from CT scans to simulate blood flow, while Philips\u2019s HeartNavigator uses a patient-specific digital heart model for surgical planning and simulation of transcatheter valve procedures.<\/p>\n

What it takes to build digital twins<\/p>\n

Implementing digital twins requires strong data infrastructure, skilled teams and collaboration across health, academia and industry. These requirements may sound demanding, but they are also what make digital twins such a strategic investment: once the foundations are in place, the benefits compound across multiple use cases.<\/p>\n

Ireland has made welcome progress in the last couple of years with hard-won improvements in managing patient flow, capacity and discharge planning showing what can be achieved. Huge credit is due to senior health leaders in this respect as well as all staff working in the sector. However, much of this progress has depended on manual interventions \u2013 daily meetings taking up valuable time, long hours from dedicated staff and a fair amount of firefighting in real time.<\/p>\n

Digital twins could build on that progress, automating processes and embedding foresight and predictive capability directly into the system.<\/p>\n

1) Local twins: hospitals and operations<\/p>\n

Imagine a digital twin of a busy emergency department such as in Beaumont or Cork University Hospital. A well-built digital twin of the ED could identify early warning signals \u2013 for example around discharge timing, diagnostic availability or porter scheduling \u2013 in a way that points to the required solution and enable proactive intervention before issues materialise, turning crisis management into proactive data-informed decision making. <\/p>\n

2) System-level twins: national health planning<\/p>\n

What if we had a digital twin of the entire HSE or the national health ecosystem? Such a model would be a strategic national asset, built in bite-sized chunks: start with hospitals, expand to primary care, layer in community services and knit the pieces together. Scaling this nationally would let Ireland model and anticipate the impact of, for example, demographic shifts, new technologies and evolving care needs. Our relatively compact system and vibrant technology and life sciences sector position us to be global early adopters.<\/p>\n

3) Population-level twins: public health planning<\/p>\n

Another exciting horizon is the application of digital twins to population-based planning. Imagine being able to model the long-term health impacts of interventions such as obesity prevention programmes, smoking cessation campaigns or vaccine roll-outs. A population-level digital twin could simulate how these changes ripple across decades \u2013 identifying not just clinical benefits but also cost savings, productivity gains and reductions in health inequality.<\/p>\n

4) Patient-level twins: personalised medicine<\/p>\n

In the clinical domain, personalised medicine is an exciting frontier for digital twins. Digital twins of organs or entire human bodies are being trialled internationally to tailor treatments in areas such as cardiology and oncology. This application leans heavily towards life sciences and pharma rather than hospital operations. But that plays to Ireland\u2019s strengths. With our world-class footprint in pharma and medtech, we are well positioned to be at the forefront of digital twin \u2013 enabled personalised medicine.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Unthinkable: The chatbot will see you now: is this the future of Irish medicine?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Moving from firefighting to foresight<\/p>\n

Digital twins can\u2019t see patients or clear waiting lists, but they can arm decision makers with rich insights. By letting us rehearse healthcare decisions they could help Ireland move from health system firefighting to foresight.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Hospitals\u2019 wait-time performance \u2018a concern\u2019 says Minister as flu pressure mountsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

By moving step by step from individual hospitals to the entire healthcare system, from population planning to personalised medicine, if we become early adopters of what digital twins can deliver, we can place Ireland at the forefront of this global opportunity.<\/p>\n

Dr Mary Coghlan is a partner at EY Ireland, where she leads on health data and analytics. She is a qualified medical doctor, actuary and analytics expert who supports organisations to use advanced health analytics to support better health outcomes for populations<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Picture the scene in the emergency department of a typical acute Irish hospital at 10pm on a Friday.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":234202,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[218,103,397,396,3267,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-234201","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-health-care","11":"tag-healthcare","12":"tag-hospitals","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}