What Is a Smart Hospital?

Healthcare and life sciences organizations have long invested in individual technologies to advance care and discovery. While targeted solutions continue to provide great value, they are often disconnected from each other, resulting in data silos, disjointed patient experiences, and operational inefficiencies.

As the healthcare industry confronts an increasing and aging population, novel diseases, and worker shortages, the need for new solutions to address these challenges grows.

Smart—or digital—hospitals apply a comprehensive approach to technology integration, enabling them to unlock insights from the vast amount of collected data to improve patient outcomes and care experiences, optimize operations, and accelerate innovation.

Key characteristics of a smart hospital include:

• A unified technology infrastructure that connects disparate clinical and business systems and provides secure access to shared data.
• Use of artificial intelligence (AI), advanced analytics, edge computing, and high-performance networking to deliver rapid access to critical data insights and innovative services.

AI in Smart Hospitals

Integrated throughout connected systems and devices, AI use cases in healthcare are already helping to transform the patient and clinician experience, enhance and accelerate diagnostics and treatment, streamline workflows, and bolster data security.

AI is being used to automate tedious tasks to decrease costs, expedite patient care, and reduce provider burnout. Enabled with technologies like natural language processing, electronic health record systems are automatically generating notes and medical coding. AI-enabled robots are being used to simplify routine tasks, improve efficiency, accelerate discovery, and allow practitioners more time to focus on care delivery.

Patients, too, are benefitting from automation in digital hospitals using AI-enabled kiosks that can process visual and audio input, check vital signs, and provide directions. AI chatbots and virtual assistants powered by generative AI (GenAI) are auto-generating care checklists from postvisit notes and enabling patients to search provider materials for answers to noncritical health questions.

Benefits of a Smart Hospital

Hospital systems are undergoing a digital transformation, upgrading infrastructure to create an interconnected, data-driven environment. This shift enables operations to scale more efficiently, provides medical staff with comprehensive access to patient information, optimizes clinical workflows for accelerated insights and increased provider productivity, and results in enhanced personalized patient care.

Connected Care across the Healthcare Network

Securely connected systems and devices with shared data access can improve coordination between healthcare providers by enabling continuous patient care across different facilities, specialties, and data points. This seamless integration, including automated workflows, allows patients to receive the right care at the right time and place, anywhere in the healthcare ecosystem. It also provides added financial benefits, as patients can be redirected to alternate care options, such as telehealth platforms or community clinics, when hospital resources are not essential to treatment.

Near-Real-Time Access to Data

Vast amounts of data generated and captured across the healthcare ecosystem can be transformed into actionable insights to inform and expedite decisions, deliver more-personalized care, and reduce costs.
For example, data from AI-enabled medical imaging devices can be analyzed with other patient data to accelerate diagnosis or generate a personalized treatment plan.

Real-Time Responsiveness

Networked medical and other devices with integrated real-time computing technologies provide the high degree of required coordination critical for conditions requiring prompt and accurate insights and action. For example, AI-based remote patient monitoring systems can alert nursing staff caring for multiple patients when a specific patient’s vitals indicate emergent conditions, enabling rapid response.

End-to-End Data Security

Unified technical infrastructure can provide a defense-in-depth approach to data security to help prevent system compromises, provide data privacy and access control, and keep smart hospitals in compliance.

Operational Efficiency

Secure access to shared data from connected systems, combined with data analytics, can positively affect the bottom line. Automated supply tracking and management can result in timely restocking and reduce costs. Insurance and contact information collected via self-serve check-in kiosks combined with automated workflows can accelerate claims processing. Predictive analytics, used to forecast the length of stay, and AI-enabled systems can also help optimize staff scheduling, reducing costs and boosting facility utilization.

Challenges to Achieving Smart Hospital Transformation

Moving to a more fully integrated smart hospital model can present challenges.

Data Access

To provide improved diagnosis, care, and patient experiences, smart hospitals, associated facilities, and providers need near-real-time access to patient data captured throughout the patient care journey. When systems are not integrated, the result could be fragmented patient data and incomplete protocol or facility transfers. Smart hospital systems also need enough compute power, memory, and storage to allow devices, applications, and personnel to work together seamlessly for better patient outcomes.

Modern Infrastructure

Inflexible, inefficient, or proprietary existing infrastructure or technologies can prevent the adoption of new and innovative applications for patient care. Smart hospitals use computer-aided surgical equipment for operations and diagnostics, which means the infrastructure must be able to support them. Upgrading existing infrastructure and devices to accommodate modern healthcare requirements can require significant transformation. This makes implementing new technologies and comprehensive management tools an important initiative for smart hospitals.

Data Security and Patient Privacy

With personal and organizational data stored and shared across multiple systems, properly addressing data security, privacy, and regulatory compliance is critical. Smart hospital IT needs effective, modern cybersecurity measures—both hardware and software based—in place to protect systems and data from ransomware and customized and credential-based attacks. Smart hospitals should also determine, document, and enforce data protection strategies and governance procedures.

Smart Hospital Success Stories

Smart hospitals and the patients they serve are already benefiting from connected, intelligent systems.

Protected Data Access

Working closely with technology partners, smart hospitals are implementing proven, advanced solutions to enable secure data sharing across their ecosystems while protecting data and maintaining compliance. 
For example, one US-based healthcare system provider is working with its customers to implement a decentralized data solution that secures automation across organizations, increases data integrity, and delivers an immutable audit trail. Elsewhere in the US, a medical school completed a joint research study on the efficacy of using federated learning to share collaborative data across international healthcare and research institutions without exposing sensitive data or the algorithms processing it.

Innovative Care Delivery

To improve patient outcomes and lower costs, healthcare organizations are looking to advances in AI to spur innovation.

One Alabama-based hospital has integrated an AI-based platform in the ICU for patient monitoring. Using predictive analytics to analyze patient data from multiple devices, the platform alerts staff to changes in patient vitals or potential events that require intervention before they occur. This remote monitoring capability also enables the hospital to scale up ICU capacity without compromising the quality of care.

In Japan, a public university is using a video recognition system with deep learning to monitor patients receiving home blood transfusions to improve the safety of the treatment and patient quality of life.

Clinician Training and Productivity

Smart hospitals also use innovative technologies for cost-effective training and to improve staff productivity. While regulatory compliance, reporting standards, and patient expectations for data privacy can be challenging, the rewards are many.

A children’s hospital in Miami, Florida, is using AI, mixed reality, and the cloud to help anonymize personally identifiable information in patient data so it can be used for training purposes.

 A US West Coast healthcare provider is using immersive learning powered by augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to transform staff training across their locations.

How Can I Make My Hospital Smart?

Designing a digital hospital requires more than simply introducing new products and technologies. A comprehensive and purposeful approach to the construction and management of modern hospitals is needed to better ensure patients receive higher-quality care with greater operational efficiency.

There are three key elements of a smart hospital to consider:

• Digital healthcare system connectivity: Internal hospital system connectivity is critical to deliver unified access to and centralized management of medical data and paperless diagnosis and treatment.
• Digital services: In-depth integration of information technologies and medical services throughout a patient’s healthcare journey is key to providing more- personalized, -intelligent, and -convenient experiences.
• Digital management: Centralized hospital management platforms that leverage data from various departments—from operations to human resources, finance, accounting, facilities management, and other business functions—are necessary to support smart hospitals in intelligently forecasting operational trends and improving operational management and efficiency.

Whether upgrading or building new infrastructure, healthcare organizations can work closely with technology partners throughout planning, implementation, deployment, and optimization to help ensure the success of their smart hospital digital transformation.

The Future of Smart Hospitals

Smart hospitals will become the standard in modern healthcare, able to deliver highly specialized services in near-real time. Telemedicine, wearable devices, and remote patient monitoring will provide more routine care. Community resources will become part of the smart hospital network through secure, connected digital technologies.

These modern hospitals will run on massive amounts of data, captured at the edge or in a device, to fuel insights, innovations, and efficiencies at every step of the patient experience. Data privacy, security, and protected access will remain a high priority as data drives workflow efficiencies, clinician performance, and patient outcomes.

AI in healthcare will become even more central to modern hospital operations, from imaging systems to emergency triage to more-accurate diagnoses of patient conditions and more-efficient workflows.

Overall, healthcare professionals will have more time for higher-value patient care as routine and repetitive tasks become automated. Patients will experience more-personalized, responsive care, from sensors that automatically adjust lighting and room temperature based on the patient’s needs to accelerated diagnosis and treatment.