Don’t mistake the phrase smart or intelligent hospital for a distant point on the horizon.

“The point of care is shifting out of the hospital into the smart home. This is the hospital of today – not some Disneyworld vision of what it’s going to look like in 30 years,” said Harry Pappas, founder and CEO of the Intelligent Health Association. “These technologies already exist.”

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Indeed, at HIMSS18 some 50 innovative companies will be featured in IHA’s Intelligent Health Pavilion. Pappas said the pavilion is all about putting those products in context to educate healthcare professionals in a vendor-neutral tech-agnostic fashion how to leverage the tools to better serve patients.

Among the 50 companies — which Pappas added earn a spot in the pavilion by peer-review not buying a booth — are innovators deploying a range of technologies from Amazon Alexa to Google X Glass to wayfinding apps. 

While he was careful to stress these are only a few of the examples, Pappas pointed to 11 Health, Bodimetrics, Kenzen and Zeiss, as in the legendary optics maker.

11Health offers the ostim-i Alert Sensor that uses Bluetooth to connect the sensor to a smartphone app and send alerts to ostomy patients and caregivers should problems arise.

Bodimetrics, for its part, sells a wearable that tracks fitness and lifestyle to improve sleep quality while Kenzen’s biosensor patch analyzes biomarkers sweat with predictive analytics to make sure users are properly hydrated.

And Zeiss will be showcasing a new camera that takes digital image of your eyes and shares it with an ophthalmologist who can tell you if there’s anything wrong with your eyes, or if you have diabetes or glaucoma.

“We have 50 companies like this. We’re bringing in the brightest and the best who are transforming healthcare,” Pappas said. “3-D printing, lasers in surgery, artificial intelligence, they all come together in our pavilion.”

The Intelligent Health Pavilion also features what Pappas described as “conferences within the HIMSS18 conference,” notably events focusing on the Internet of Health Things, Location-based services such as RFID, Real-Time Location Services and barcoding, as well as another on wearables and sensors in healthcare.

The pavilion also includes model intelligent rooms, such as Labor and Delivery, an Intensive Care Unit, an Operation Room and a Doctor’s office.

Labor and delivery, for instance, consists of beautiful hardwood floors, carefully-considered colors of paint, draperies and wallpaper, comforting music, and Amazon Alexa to control Philips Smart Hue lighting to create what Pappas said is a total immersion because all of those factors can have an impact on wellbeing and recovery.

The ICU will include smartphone apps for inventorying equipment, such as sponges with RFID tags, to make the process both faster and more accurate and also easily locate an infusion pump and know whether it needs to be cleaned or the firmware updated, just to name two examples.

“We're bringing in companies transforming healthcare,” Pappas said. “We’re doing precision medicine solutions. That’s where it's all going: precision medicine.”

Pappas likened the current state of so many smart and intelligent technologies in hospitals to the time when people had to learn how to use email, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel when they first arrived.

Only now the question is: How do I use Amazon Alexa or Google X Glass in the operating room? 

“My goal is to transform healthcare. If I have to cause a revolution I’ll cause a revolution, for the good of society,” Pappas said. “This stuff is real. You can buy it tomorrow morning — so we’re the hospital of today not the hospital of tomorrow.” 

The Intelligent Hospital Pavilion will be at Booth 11657, Level 1, Hall G. 

Twitter: SullyHIT
Email the writer: tom.sullivan@himssmedia.com