Smart Rooms in the Hospital of the Future

Written by Ginny Torno

Houston Methodist is currently building our 9th hospital in Cypress, scheduled to open in 2025. We call it our “Hospital of the Future.” In the past, when we have expanded and built a new hospital, we maximize efficiencies by using existing plans and implementing the same infrastructure used in another one of our locations…not this time around.

Houston Methodist Cypress Hospital will utilize many new groundbreaking technologies and processes, and we plan to incorporate them into our existing hospitals as well. Our core strategy aligns with the mindset that patients are at the center of everything we do.

Imagine walking into a physician office to be greeted with “Welcome, Mr. Anderson, we’re ready for you. Please proceed to room 5.”

This experience is driven by our “Know Me” strategy.  By preparing and educating our patients ahead of their scheduled visits and enabling technology that allows patients to quickly check-in and identify themselves once they arrive at the hospital, we can provide a seamless patient experience. Once checked in, patients and care teams can use voice-enabled technology to carry out many routine tasks. In the inpatient room, they have the option to control room temperature and lighting with voice commands, call a nurse or request help, and use their voices to document notes in the patient’s electronic health record. We are so confident in this strategy that we have removed the budget for computers and telephones in the inpatient rooms!

 Beyond voice, our Cypress Hospital patient rooms will employ technology that enables additional quality and safety features, including ambient monitoring tools and wearable devices. These technologies help keep our patients safe by proactively detecting a possible fall, alerting care teams to incontinence issues, monitoring pressure injuries, ensuring proper handwashing, and more. New wireless wearable devices stream patient vitals into central monitoring systems that not only help us detect changes in a patient’s well-being on a faster timetable but also eliminate the need to wake patients up every few hours to periodically check vitals. As the Internet of Things and wearable healthcare device markets continue to grow, there are vast possibilities we can implement to improve patient care.

 At first glance, Cypress may look like a typical hospital with similar inpatient rooms, like the TV mounted on the wall. However, that TV includes numerous intelligent automation features. When a care team member enters the room, the TV adjusts to display a digital whiteboard informing them of the patient’s preferred name and language, any safety restrictions, dietary considerations, upcoming procedures, and more. The digital whiteboard can be brought up at any time on demand. Patient education, food ordering (accounting for dietary restrictions), room controls, facilities requests, entertainment options, and virtual visits from physicians, spiritual care, and family members are also facilitated through the same smart TV. Patients will even be able to connect their own device to these features and control it all through their own phone or tablet.

At Cypress, we are exploring robotics for food preparation and delivery, pharmaceutical fulfillment and delivery, and housekeeping. Augmented and virtual reality can be available for patient education, clinical training and physical therapy. Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) assistants can guide patients through questions they may have and offer feedback in either a text chat or voice conversation, including follow-ups. There are many more innovations in discussion that we can share as they develop.

 All of this technology will be built on top of a flexible and powerful infrastructure system that has been carefully planned. While we are building the Hospital of the Future in Cypress, we are piloting many of these technologies in our existing hospitals in order to ensure the best possible patient experience from day one.