Preparing for the Next Wave of Smart Hospitals

Digital transformation remains a key strategic goal for the health care industry, and the ongoing pressure to optimize workflows, maximize human resources and adjust to powerful technologies like generative AI has led to a resurging interest in the smart hospital concept. Broadly defined, a smart hospital is one that is fully digitized and interconnected across the care continuum, leveraging interoperable data for actionable insights to improve clinical outcomes, operational efficiencies and the patient experience.

Some of these smart hospitals have recently opened or are set to open soon, while others are still just a blueprint. Below are two examples from the field.

Case in Brief: Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta

Children's Healthcare of Atlanta is opening its new Arthur M. Blank Hospital in September 2024. The planning for this new hospital started over seven years ago, with the organization relying on its Patient and Parent Advisory Council to better understand patient needs and preferences, while also analyzing common pain points for staff.

To test run emerging design concepts, the health system turned a 100,000-square-foot warehouse into a hospital mock-up to define space needs and experiment with different physical layouts—this also influenced IT planning related to network load and more basic considerations like outlet plug locations.

The hospital will open with a fleet of robots, a third of which will be patient facing to help deliver meals, medications or other items. There will also be autonomous mobile robots to help haul away linen and trash carts, using six elevators that are designed for robotic use.

With approximately 60 facility and supply chain–related technical systems, hospital leadership has a clear focus on prioritizing network integration and automation, including:

• Using radio-frequency identification technology on the operational side to automate aspects of inventory and billing management for supply chain
• Developing 11 predictive analytics models on the clinical side to assist staff with decision-making, allowing them to see data and triage cases on smartphones
• Using real-time location systems to track staff so when they enter a patient’s room, their information will display on a TV screen and digital whiteboard; the whiteboard will also allow staff to pull up details from the patient’s medical record, including radiology images

Case in Brief: Mayo Clinic

Beginning early 2024, the Mayo Clinic initiated a redesign of its main campus in Rochester, Minnesota. Set to be completed by 2030, the new campus will be heavily digitized as Mayo leadership seeks to build an operating model that blends technology and virtual care with physical care across the patient journey. The new construction will include five new buildings and a logistics center that will use robots, predictive analytics and other automation to enable seamless supply delivery using a tunnel system.

The new facilities will also be built around a concept of “unified care neighborhoods,” where aspects of patient treatment, labs, imaging and other services are located near each other, blurring the lines between inpatient and outpatient care. As part of this, the hospital’s buildings will include a “flexible grid” design, allowing different spaces or even entire floors the capacity to serve multiple purposes depending on need. For example, standard patient rooms could be modified to serve as an operating room or diagnostic imaging suite, helping reduce the need for patient transfers.

Systems of Integration: The Building Blocks of a Smart Hospital

The path to creating a smart hospital requires a reassessment—or in some cases a full redesign—of the existing operating model. Technology investments—from ambient sensors to patient monitoring equipment to surgical robots—will be a core feature of smart hospitals, but the process of creating a smart hospital does not depend on any one technology. Furthermore, investing in multiple technologies does not provide value to a hospital if those solutions are fragmented or lack connectivity across people, departments and processes.

To be a truly smart hospital, core IT infrastructure and emerging digital solutions must be fully integrated with operations—it is these “systems of integration” that are common denominators for how health care stakeholders can evaluate the strategic value they obtain from technology investments.

In setting a long-term strategy for building the hospital of the future and responding to the ever-changing effects of digital transformation, health care leaders should consider how each individual technology investment rolls up into one of these systems of integration.

Additional Considerations for Hospital Leaders

• What is “smart” is relative. Today, health care leaders may be grappling with evaluating deep learning algorithms and augmented reality, but at one point in time the fax machine was an innovation. Always maintain a sense of nimbleness to prepare for changing business needs.
• There is no universal template of a smart hospital. Every organization should approach this process in a way that best suits its unique strategic vision, business needs, staffing structure, risk tolerance and culture.
• Apart from having clinical champions and executive sponsors to drive adoption, designated leaders for smart hospital initiatives that have dual roles in both innovation and operations are best situated to steer organizational efforts and encourage buy-in from staff.