Future Bets for the Smart Hospital

Written by Trent Fulin

Innovation is at the core of Houston Methodist 's approach to Leading Medicine. Houston Methodist Cypress Hospital, our smart hospital, will be a testament to our dedication to unparalleled safety, quality, service, and innovation. In preparing for the launch of this new hospital in 2025, these 12 "future bets" are what make this project entirely unique and transformative for the health care industry in our community and beyond.

1 & 2) Self-control scheduling and check-in

Self-service opportunities exist in many facets of our daily life including supermarkets, airlines, and banking, yet this type of experience is not commonplace in health care settings. We envision transforming the typically bleak hospital and clinic waiting room into a more welcoming lounge for patients with the goal of reducing overall wait times.

3)??? Clinical and financial knowledge with digital care pathways

Houston Methodist began implementing our digital care pathways program in 2018 and has since grown to over 100 offerings. Through the care pathways initiative, patients receive educational materials, timely reminders, task checklists, and engaging health monitoring prompts through small digestible bits of information and various types of communication channels (text, email, phone). The overwhelming success of this program has shown lower readmission rates, shorter average length of stay, and a 96% patient satisfaction rate.??

?4)??? Call center automation

During the height of the pandemic, Houston Methodist established a partnership with a conversational, artificially intelligent voice assistant to create a COVID-19 Vaccine Hotline managed through a centralized call center utilizing “bots” to help patients answer frequently asked questions, initiate a self-scheduling workflow, and maintain the operational integrity of the front-line contact centers.? This pilot project was immediately successful, leading to improved patient access, increased call-in capacity, and cost reduction measures. Following this initial use case for call center automation, we have deployed several other phone assistants to help streamline access across our various departments and hospital sites. Our patients get the appropriate responses quicker and calls are not abandoned or dropped without overburdening our existing call centers. At Cypress, instead of using space for call centers, we can focus on providing additional patient services.

5)??? “Phygital” – digital and physical care

A successful phygital implementation seamlessly integrates both digital and physical care, increasing access to care and maximizing the abilities of care teams. The concept of virtual medicine extends well beyond the outpatient setting with one of our most important projects being the virtual intensive care units (vICU).? With the vICU, a team of centralized clinical staff work to support the bedside clinical teams via two-way audiovisual technologies and real-time clinical data analysis. In addition to the vICU, Houston Methodist is also working on a strategy to install cameras in inpatient rooms and equip outpatient clinics with easy access to virtual consults.

6)??? Smart hospital rooms

Patients are at the center of everything we do and that extends to the creation and development of our new smart hospital rooms.? We want the smart hospital room to serve as an extension of the patient’s home and provide a feeling of self-control, care, and comfort. Some of the exciting features include a centralized screen for entertainment, education, and a digital whiteboard; voice-controlled room settings for temperature, lighting, window shades, and even food ordering; and virtual medicine enabled rooms to connect clinicians with their patients – anytime, anywhere. This unified patient experience will continue to grow and expand as we develop new partnerships and invest in more innovative technology solutions. We are guided by a more human-centric approach as the hospital room undergoes these “smarter” changes for the future of health care.

7)??? Voice assistants and ambient listening

Voice assistants, such as Siri and Alexa, have become almost ubiquitous in our daily lives, and health care is no exception. In particular, listening devices that can capture a patient and physician conversation significantly reduce manual input required by clinical teams to document patient notes.? This type of technology not only unburdens clinicians from tedious notetaking but also increases face-to-face interactions between patients and physicians for a better overall health care experience.

8)??? Ambient intelligence

With ambient intelligence technology – computer vision that creates predictive models and provides us a variety of tools to improve how we practice health care – we can focus on maximizing high-touch time with the patients, reducing interruptions for patients during their hospital stay, and improving satisfaction and performance. One of our pilot initiatives is currently testing how we can use technology to improve upon patient fall prevention, clinical documentation, hand hygiene, and more. By autonomously collecting specific surrounding data points in the hospital room, we have been able to show a reduction in time and resources spent on manual processes. Another area for improvement is in our operating rooms where we use AI technology to accurately track OR procedures, ranging from incision start time, turnover time spent, and surgical instruments used. This technology has shown to have 99% accuracy and to be 24% better at predicting OR case durations than our existing electronic health record.? Timely surgical start times translates to surgeon satisfaction and greater efficiency.

?9)??? Predictive analytics

At the core of any successful quality care and utilization management program is the use of data-driven insights to help guide clinical decision making and identify opportunities to improve patient outcomes through predictive analytics, risk scores and risk stratification methods. Through this strategy, health care providers are shifting from reactive measures to a more proactive approach, leading to improvements in overall patient care and operational efficiency. In one pilot initiative, we are working with a company that leverages a large?database of Medicare data to generate personalized information for every?patient, including likelihood to develop a chronic condition or risk of an?adverse event.? Similarly, we are engaging with another company who uses?natural language processing to pull important insights from clinical notes?in the Electronic Health Record (EHR). We are setting up a process to?integrate these insights seamlessly into our Epic interface and reduce?length of stay and readmission rates.?

10) Service robots

Robots are currently used throughout our hospital facilities to complete many operational tasks including security rounding, medication deliveries, supply chain transport, and even food service preparation. Robots can be especially useful as a reliable and secure alternative when medications need to be transported quickly, allowing pharmacy staff to continue with other necessary tasks. As robotic technology evolves and costs decrease, we envision many additional use cases for service robots throughout our hospitals.

11) Remote patient monitoring

Over the past century, our approach to “vital signs” has remained virtually unchanged – requiring labor-intensive manual collection, interrupting our patients’ rest and yet missing signs of patient deterioration between collection times. Through the adoption of leading-edge sensors and wearable technologies, powered by clinical intelligence engines, Houston Methodist is poised to shift from a traditional episodic model of care to one that is more automated and continuous. Use of these technologies will ensure leading quality hospital care despite workforce challenges and to better support patients staying out of the hospital.

?12) Multi-modal education

Educational transformation has moved beyond the traditional classroom setting. Instead of requiring staff to sit through multi-day annual training sessions, the education materials are transitioning towards more timely, relevant, and digestible bits of information, similar to the patients’ digital care pathways model.?

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These future bets for the smart hospital are defining our strategy towards leading medicine for yesterday, today, and tomorrow!