Hospitals around the world have invested heavily in artificial intelligence, automation, telehealth and digital patient tools. In many cases, the technology is already there. The problem is getting people to use it.
That gap between adoption and implementation emerged as a central theme during Newsweek's September 3 webinar, "What Makes a Smart Hospital?" presented by Cognizant. Executives from Samsung Medical Center (Seoul, South Korea), Sheba Medical Center (Ramat Gan, Israel) and NYU Langone Health (New York City) joined global data and research company Statista to discuss what separates isolated digital projects from health system-wide transformation. Data from Statista's latest Smart Hospitals Digital Maturity Survey—used during the scoring process of Newsweek's annual World's Best Hospitals ranking—suggest that access to advanced technology is becoming nearly ubiquitous among participating hospitals.
But when researchers measured how extensively those technologies had actually been implemented, the numbers dropped sharply. Almost no hospitals reported full implementation across all of the survey's subcategories. Teleconsultation offers one example.
Eighty-two percent of surveyed hospitals reported some level of implementation, but more than 53 percent said it was used in fewer than one in 20 consultations. Among the survey's leading hospitals, one-third said more than 20 percent of consultations involved teleconsultation. Across countries and regulatory environments, the common denominator among digitally mature hospitals is less flashy than the latest AI application, according to Dr.
Joshua Stevenson-Hoare, leader of Statista's health care analysis team. The other speakers agreed that buying or testing a technology does not make a hospital "smart." Integrating it into routine care, getting clinicians and patients to use it and proving it improves outcomes at scale might. "Pilots are relatively easy," said Dr.
Eyal Zimlichman, chief innovation and AI officer at Sheba Medical Center and the founder and director of ARC Innovation. Hospitals can typically find an enthusiastic clinician willing to test a new tool, Zimlichman said. The bigger challenge comes when an organization tries to move from reaching one or two percent of patients to 20, 30 or 50 percent.
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