Developing smart hospitals has been a way for South Korea to meet the growing demand for more personalised healthcare in their fast-ageing society. 

At the helm of this effort is the Korea Health Industry Development Institute (KHIDI), an agency under the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Its principal researcher, Jong Yeob Kim, shared how they are fostering smart hospitals in South Korea in the HIMSS24 APAC session, "Patient-Centered Healthcare Transformation Based on Sustainability: Insights from Korea's Smart Hospital Initiatives."

KHIDI piloted the smart hospital project in 2020. It involved 17 partner hospitals that were supported in their transformation into model smart hospitals. The project also developed and deployed 74 smart hospital tools since its launch. 

Kim, in Korean, said their agency intended for the smart hospital "to utilise various technologies to improve the quality of healthcare services, reduce staff workload, and increase the hospital operational efficiency, so patients will have a positive experience in their journey from admission to discharge." 

The emphasis on improving patient experience, he said, is what differentiates a smart hospital from a digital hospital. 

A smart hospital, Kim said, is also "not just a single entity." KHIDI staged the project in three phases: first, to make an individual hospital smart, second, to connect hospitals to it, and third, to connect the hospital network with local communities. This puts the individual smart hospital at the centre of the smart ecosystem. 

"Our ultimate goal… is not to make one hospital smart. We aim to improve the efficiency of the entire medical service of the country. And with smart hospitals at the centre, we are moving toward providing the public with better quality medical service."

Findings from trial

Now, KHIDI has been working to replicate the concept in other hospitals across the country. A part of this effort is developing an evaluation model to gauge the effectiveness of the smart hospital concept. It has six points: technological value, data, operational efficiency, medical service quality, user experience, and post-implementation. 

Findings from its evaluation of the project revealed an overall positive impact on patients and staff.

"Nurses, doctors, and hospital staff working in extremely harsh and dangerous settings have reported that their stress was greatly reduced through this system," Kim shared. Hospital employees, he noted, also expressed greater loyalty and time spent on providing patient care. 

"An environment has been created where workers can focus on actual nursing care work… We also found that there was an effect of reducing unnecessary work time by about half."

The agency, Kim said, was also surprised to find positive feedback from patients, who even agreed to expand the smart hospital concept throughout the country.

"We were worried that there might be some resistance to digitalisation, given that hospitals have many elderly patients. But when we actually conducted a nationwide patient survey, many said that it was very convenient and that these smart hospitals should expand in the future."

Patients also thought that a smart hospital provided better services than the others. 

Additionally, an increase in the uptake of digital technologies was observed, further enabling the patients' proactive involvement in their care. 

"[The smart hospital concept trial] shows that we can [potentially] receive quality medical services not only by going to large hospitals but also by receiving such services at local smart hospitals in the regions [outside major cities]," Kim emphasised.

Digitalising at the right time

Needless to say, transforming hospitals into smart hospitals is no easy feat. Kim underscored the importance of getting the appropriate technology at the right time. 

"No matter how good a technology is, if it's a technology that can't be used in hospital settings, it may be premature, so we proceeded with models that we could apply right away," Kim stated. For example, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, there was an obvious focus on enabling telemedicine, implementing smart infection control, and ensuring efficient management of hospital resources at a smart hospital.

"Our goal [has always been] to provide services by efficiently utilising the appropriate technology at the right time, with the right people, in the right place."