5 Trends That Will Determine The Hospital From The Future

For centuries, scientists have been trying to envision the future of hospitals. Following the recent shift towards digital health technologies and the adoption of remote care approaches, it is only natural to wonder how these developments will impact those healthcare institutions. What can we expect from them in the future? Will there be hospitals altogether in a decade?

The short answer is yes, physical institutions will still be part of the future of healthcare. However, their roles will be significantly different from what they currently are. They will integrate new elements of design, accommodate digital health technologies, and become specialised centers for invasive procedures, acute care, and disease prevention. In tandem, a significant portion of care will be offloaded outside of the confines of hospitals and healthcare professionals will need to adopt new roles for this purpose.

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To dive into the trends shaping up this future and the required elements for hospitals to be future-ready, The Medical Futurist updated our beloved e-book 'A Guide To The Future Of Hospitals'. Composed of seven chapters and including input from industry experts, this e-book aims to equip policymakers, healthcare professionals, and digital health businesses with adequate insights to prepare for the future of hospitals.

To provide a glimpse of what to expect from our new publication, this article explores five trends that will help shape the hospital of the future. We go into more details in our e-book and we would encourage you to discover more by purchasing a copy of The Guide To The Future Of Hospitals.

1. The shift of the POC towards homes

The point-of-care (POC) refers to the location where care is delivered. Traditionally, this referred to the patient’s bedside in a healthcare facility. But as recent years have highlighted, the POC extends beyond hospital walls to include where the patients are, thanks to remote care and telehealth services, wearables, portable diagnostics, and at-home lab tests.

This means that patients often can now be monitored and receive healthcare recommendations from the comfort of their homes. This has spurred the new concept of ‘virtual wards’.

Virtual wards offer hospital-grade attention to patients in their own homes using remote monitoring health tools. These provide real-time monitoring which, combined with two-way communication, allows patients to be in touch with healthcare professionals. The latter can subsequently provide prompt intervention if they identify signs of deterioration. Procedures such as intravenous therapies that require trained professionals are performed by a visiting nurse.

Such approaches have already been piloted in countries like the U.K., U.S., Singapore and Australia. As they become more common in the future, hospitals have to be adequately equipped and designed to support such a modality of care delivery.

2. Designing specific spaces for remote care consultations

Virtual wards aren’t the only approach that will make use of remote care but a significant proportion of outpatient consultations will also be handled in this manner. McKinsey forecasts that, in the future, 25% of outpatient services could be conducted through telemedicine.?Such an approach can help diminish the rate of unnecessary visits while improving the patient experience.

To handle the new normal, clinical spaces will need rethinking to accommodate rooms dedicated to virtual consultations and remote care. These will include user-friendly sound and lighting control, with dual screens to simultaneously converse with the patient and access their medical records,” Dr Diana Anderson told The Medical Futurist.

3. From hand-written notes to voice-to-text

Clinical documentation systems evolved significantly during the past decades, moving from paper to computers. While most hospitals currently rely on electronic health record (EHR) systems, the necessary administration is among the top contributors to physician burnout. Healthcare professionals spend a considerable amount of time entering data into EHRs, leaving them with less time to spend with their patients. Many consider EHRs as their number one challenge.

A promising alternative to manually inputting data into EHRs is voice-to-text technology. It operates via a voice recognition system that transcribes patient-doctor visits without requiring physical input.

This field has been developing steadily for decades, but progress has become very evident in the past few years. Nuance and 3M were among the first to focus significant efforts on the automated (medical) scribe segment, offering voice recognition services that create clinical notes that integrate into EHRs.

Microsoft's $16bn acquisition of Nuance in 2022 shows new levels of commitment, resources, and partnerships. Following the early 2023 announcements of working on integrating GPT-4 into Epic's EHR systems, Nuance's artificial intelligence (AI) based DAX CoPilot is now fully embedded in Epic EHR, and is available to hundreds of hospitals and health systems.

But Nuance's DAX (and Dragon) are not the only ones offering AI scribes for medical purposes. A French contender, Nabla Copilot is also successful on the other side of the Atlantic.

By slashing the need to type into EHRs, physicians can spend more time with their patients and provide medical attention.

The healthcare sector shifted from paper records to administrators, electronic medical records, and now, voice-to-text applications. But it is not the end of the road. We are looking forward to the potential of Multimodal Large Language Models (M-LLMs) which promise a comprehensive and efficient system, potentially reclaiming the human touch in medical care.

4. AI in decision-making

Another technology with major potential to enhance the functioning of hospitals is artificial intelligence (AI). Its contribution ranges from reducing alarm fatigue to triaging, from administration to clinical decision-making.?

AI can indeed assist in a multitude of diagnostic processes. Such software can, for instance, provide pointers from medical data to help clinicians identify conditions such as ADHD, sleep disorders, and quantify coronary artery calcification.?

Essentially, AI-powered tools can become the doctor’s new assistant that can crunch through volumes of data from their EHRs and radiological scans. They can then detect patterns and suspicious signs, and provide recommendations.?Physicians can subsequently interpret those recommendations and determine the optimal clinical route for the patient.

One especially exciting aspect of the AI revolution is the field of generative AI, and large (and small) language models in particular - a segment that stepped into the spotlight recently.?

Although these “general” large language models were not developed (and approved) for giving medical advice, medical LLMs do exist. One of the most prominent examples is Google's Med-PaLM 2.?This LLM is specifically trained on a massive dataset of medical text, including research papers, clinical notes, and textbooks. This specialised training allows Med-PaLM 2 to understand complex medical terminology and concepts and according to this pre-print paper, with impressive accuracy. Med-PaLM 2 is not accessible to the general public, but the Mayo Clinic has reportedly been testing the system since 2023.

This brings us to the next major concept: multimodal large language models, or M-LLMs, we mentioned at the end of the previous segment. M-LLMs will be crucial in the future of hospitals. Multimodal systems can process and interpret multiple types of input data, such as text, images, audio, and video, simultaneously. These M-LLM systems will eventually serve as a central hub for various unimodal AI applications in hospitals, translating between various technologies and humans, allowing a single, easy-to-use interface to control a wide range of applications.?

AI has a vast amount of potential in healthcare and as it becomes integral to care delivery, hospitals should be able to accommodate them. Cloud computing infrastructure could be such a means to make healthcare facilities AI-ready, but the medical staff should also get acquainted with the technology and its realistic potential.

5. Cybersecurity and how hospitals can keep patients' data safe

With the increased digitisation of healthcare, healthcare establishments will need to acknowledge the accompanying cybersecurity risks. Cyberattacks, which experienced a rise in the past years, can compromise sensitive patient data as well as force the cancellation of crucial services such as surgeries and radiology exams.?

Hospitals should thus set up proper safeguarding protocols and approaches against cybercrimes. They can educate and train staff to identify and counter activities of malicious third parties, which often exploit human psychology.?

Regarding the technical aspect, anti-virus and anti-ransomware protection should be employed; and operating systems and software applications should be updated. Outdated software was in fact behind the leading cause of the infamous WannaCry cyberattack on 61 NHS institutions in 2017.

On top of these cybersecurity concerns, hospitals will need to ensure that patients’ data are transparently handled. As they will increasingly employ AI tools, hospitals will need to use patient data to train the algorithms, often while collaborating with Big Tech companies. However, patients might not be explicitly informed of such uses of their data. The collaboration between Google’s DeepMind AI unit and the Royal Free London NHS Trust exemplifies this. In the latter case, certain healthcare-related details of some 1.6 million patients were shared without properly informing patients of such use.

While there is essentially no effective AI without patient data to train them on, privacy-focused training methods could be adopted. One such approach is decentralised federated learning, which has been shown to perform comparably to other centralised models to deliver quality and reliable performance.?

Hospitals will thus need to ensure that patients' data are handled responsibly and transparently; in particular in order to foster a trusting relationship between patients, hospitals and developers for effective digital health adoption.

While these five trends indicate how the hospital in the future will operate, many more factors come into play. These range from specific design elements through the impact of tech giants to the new role of healthcare professionals. We provide in-depth analyses regarding how these elements factor in the functioning of the hospital of the future and we invite you to discover them in detail in our e-book A Guide To The Future Of Hospitals.