Philips-led IWISH project receives ITEA excellence award for its contribution to improving operating room efficiency

Sep 18, 2025 | 3 minute read

The three-year IWISH (Intelligent Workflow optimization and Intuitive System interaction in Healthcare) project has received the prestigious ‘ITEA Award of Excellence for Business impact’ in recognition of its technology contributions to enhancing hospital operating room (OR) efficiency and fostering clinical workflow innovation.

Philips-led IWISH project receives ITEA excellence award for its contribution to improving operating room efficiency

The Philips-led public private partnership project, which is part of the global Eureka Research Development and Innovation Cluster on software innovation, focused on developing advanced machine learning, synthetic data generation and real-time gaze tracking for OR clinical workflow management. It showed that the approach can work in practice, tackling inefficiencies in hospital workflows that are estimated to cost European hospitals EUR 9 billion every year.

The IWISH project has demonstrated how AI-based applications can help optimize clinical workflows and reduce healthcare costs.

- Robert Hofsink, Manager Public Private Partnerships & Open Innovation at Philips

“The IWISH project has demonstrated how AI-based applications can help optimize clinical workflows and reduce healthcare costs,” said Robert Hofsink, Manager Public Private Partnerships & Open Innovation at Philips. “It was great to work with such a dedicated consortium, and I look forward to making its achievements part of everyday clinical practice.”

Current operating room planning tools can’t keep up with the unpredictable nature of surgeries, often resulting in delays and wasted resources. The IWISH public private partnership consortium focused on addressing these inefficiencies using AI-driven, video-based, procedure tracking technologies and AI-driven scheduling optimization. Its real-time procedure tracking is capable of recognizing distinct intraoperative phases and activities. The IWISH project has already demonstrated a 36% improvement in procedures finishing on time and a significant boost in algorithm accuracy for phase and activity recognition.

These advances mark a key step towards smarter, more efficient operating rooms. The project has also developed AI engines that support elective appointment booking and dynamic rescheduling, tested across four distinct use-cases: gynecology, cardiac catheterization, gallbladder surgery, and resource allocation. These capabilities have the potential to provide hospital staff with the means to manage parallel operating rooms more effectively.

Philips will further develop and test IWISH project technologies for its image-guided therapy systems in collaboration with clinical partners.

Additional information about the IWISH project can be found here.