This is a preview of the September 3 edition of Access Health—Tap here to get this newsletter delivered straight to your inbox on Thursday mornings. I spent the morning speaking with executives from some of the world's leading smart hospitals and health systems. One of them started by telling me his hospital isn't all that smart.
"Being smart, I believe, is admitting that you have many unsmart parts," Dr. Wonchul Cha, chief information officer at Samsung Medical Center, said during today's Newsweek webinar. Despite Samsung's reputation for digital maturity, Cha described his organization as still learning how to work alongside AI.
The technology, meanwhile, isn't taking "baby steps," he said. "They're doing giant steps. And we are being dragged by this technology, actually." I liked that admission because it cuts against how we often talk about health care innovation.
"Smart" can sound like a destination, or a designation bestowed on organizations with the newest AI tools, robots and digital infrastructure. Cha's point was that the organizations furthest along may be the ones most willing to acknowledge how much they still have to figure out, including the downsides of technologies they've already deployed. Data presented during the webinar reinforced that distinction.
Statista's latest Smart Hospitals Digital Maturity Survey found that technologies like AI, information systems and automation are increasingly widespread among the more than 200 hospitals surveyed globally. Deep implementation is not. Teleconsultation, for example, is available in some form at 82 percent of surveyed hospitals, yet more than half use it for fewer than one in 20 consultations.
That gap between having technology and actually becoming a smart hospital became the throughline of my conversation with Cha and leaders from Sheba Medical Center, NYU Langone Health and Statista. Professor Eyal Zimlichman, chief innovation and AI officer at Sheba and founder and director of ARC Innovation, said, "Pilots are relatively easy." The harder work begins when health systems try to connect new technology to legacy infrastructure, change clinical workflows and move from reaching one or two percent of patients to 20, 30 or 50 percent. Even the best of the best are still grappling with the definition of digital maturity and agree that it's likely to change over time.
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