Creating smart hospitals, for now and the future | HIMSS 2025

Las Vegas – In one of the first sessions of the HIMSS 2025 Global Health Conference & Exhibition, healthcare leaders talked about the importance of building smart hospitals.

Actually, as the discussion continued Monday, they stressed the need to create smarter hospitals.

When asked to describe a smart hospital, Anna Schoenbaum, vice president of applications and digital health at Penn Medicine, summed up her definition in three words: “Connected, intelligent and adaptive.”

“As healthcare evolves, we need to be able to anticipate how we may deliver care now but also in the future, as well as to understand the clinician experience that we want to offer, as well as the patient,” she said.

• Read more: HIMSS 2025: What’s big and what’s new this year

Debra Beauregard, director of medical intelligence and innovation at Rady Children’s Health, spoke of “creating for the future, not over-designing for current tech, but really creating that platform for future technologies.”

Eric Smith, the chief digital officer for Memorial Hermann Health System, said the system is taking that adaptive philosophy as it constructs new buildings and renovates existing facilities. While he joked that he didn’t want to use the analogy of a Lego, the health system is taking a building block approach.

“There's pieces and parts that continue to evolve, and newer pieces have newer capabilities and newer features,” Smith said.

Memorial Hermann doesn’t want to build new facilities that may require massive renovation in the not-too-distant future. “We really want to build something that's more platform-oriented, that we can stack additional capabilities on and also test and learn along the way,” he said.

Even as they cited the importance of looking to the future, they cited some impressive features and technology already in place to offer patients and families a better experience.

When Penn Medicine opened its new 17-story building, The Pavilion, in 2021, Schoenbaum said patients played a key role in the design of rooms. The facility’s 504 rooms are all private. Each room includes 75-inch screens and modern smart boards, dubbed Iris, that outline the care plan for the day and the doctors and nurses on the care team.

“The hospital room is designed for patient and family-centered care, and they're all private rooms, and they're designed by patients,” Schoenbaum said. A patient advisory group offered key input in the design of the rooms.

Children’s Hospital of Orange County, which merged with Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego to form Rady Children’s Health, has incorporated “virtual nursing units” to handle some administrative tasks. Patients talk to virtual nurses for admission, getting acclimated to the hospital and preparing for discharge, which allows nurses on the floors to spend more time on direct patient care, Beauregard said.

The pediatric hospital known as CHOC has developed an “immersive MRI,” which includes a video display inside the MRI machine, to help make the experience a little less uncomfortable, Beauregard said. The hospital also is using augmented reality modules, spurring kids on quests to go around the world, to help kids walk around the oncology unit.

“There’s a lot of different, fun ways to be smart,” she said.

Smith cited the importance of being careful as Memorial Hermann has built new facilities while others are still in the process of being modernized. The system didn’t want to send a message that patients in older facilities were less valued.

“We're really creating some consistency in the way we deliver the smart hospital and digital experience within our rooms,” he said.

“We didn't want to create a disparate experience just because they may be in a different socioeconomic area compared to some of our new and, I guess, more affluent areas,” Smith said.

Part of Memorial Hermann’s focus is also on improving the patient experience.

“This is how we keep the patient informed and make the patient a really active participant in their care, not necessarily trying to create a Marriott experience for them, because they're not exactly probably wanting to spend a lot of time in our hospitals, but really making them part of that care journey,” he said.

Hospitals that are looking to move toward developing smarter facilities can take some positive steps even if they don’t have abundant resources.

Children’s hospitals have experience collaborating with their peers, so smaller facilities and independent hospitals should look at partnerships, Beauregard said in an interview with Chief Healthcare Executive® after the panel discussion. She said Rady and other hospitals are “humble about what's worked what hasn't worked.”

“We share our failures and successes. What are some pathways to getting tech adopted? Because adoption is such a challenge, so making sure if we invest the resources, you don't buy a tech, train everybody, install it and walk away,” Beauregard said.

Smith suggested taking some basic steps to use digital tools to improve services.

“I think there's ways to start with just the fundamentals, as far as simple things like the ability to do video conferencing with a nurse or with a specialist. that may not be in your particular market or in your area without having to do a transfer,” Smith said. “So I think there's some basic capabilities out there that aren't that expensive and don't require massive retrofits.”

Smaller hospitals also don’t have to try and tackle big technological projects all at once, Schoenbaum said. Hospitals that have limited resources should talk to other vendors about services they’re seeking.

“Talk to other vendors,” Schoenbaum said. “Sometimes that competition is healthy, because you never know that vendor may decrease the price in order to get that relationship.”