Our understanding of health has greatly evolved. Now, we think of health as having interconnected parts: Our physical health is just as important as our mental health, and there are other factors in daily life that can impact our health.
As providers continue to adopt a whole-person health approach to care delivery, they may consider turning that lens on their own systems. Similarly, healthcare organizations should not operate in silos. The many moving parts of a facility — from environmental services and IT to radiology and oncology — are much more interconnected than previously thought.
How, then, can healthcare organizations transform their spaces, physically and virtually, to create a more streamlined, frictionless approach to care delivery that doesn’t add administrative burden to clinicians but that improves the patient experience? That’s a question most health systems want to answer, and in this issue of HealthTech, we highlight several stories that are leading the way on a promising path.
READ MORE: Patient Room ‘Next’ is the evolution of care delivery.
Health Systems Embrace Innovation
In “How Health Systems Reduce the Strain of Documentation Burden,” providers at City of Hope, a prominent cancer treatment and research organization in Southern California, describe how they are using artificial intelligence to ease the documentation burden.
“Instead of the doctor typing or going through papers, they can actually look their patients in the eye and have a conversation,” says Chief AI Officer Nasim Eftekhari. “We built this to help the clinicians, but when it went live, the patients also loved it, which is fantastic.”
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For “How Smart Hospitals Push Forward From Pilot to Practice,” we highlighted UMass Memorial Health’s new facility to centralize virtual care within the system, outfitted with smart room technologies. “We have a great nursing team. We have a great physician team. The technology is now a piece of that, and now they have a better ability to coordinate care,” says Erica Smith, chief nursing informatics officer and associate vice president of clinical informatics at UMass Memorial Health.
And to close out 2025, Catholic Health opened its new Patient Care Pavilion at Good Samaritan University Hospital in West Islip, N.Y. “We want to bring in things that hopefully remove friction from either the clinician or patient experience,” says Chief Digital and Information Officer Michael Mainiero.
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