Future Bet: Smart Spaces

Vision & Goals

Smart spaces are redefining how hospitals work. Technology-enabled environments are transforming healthcare by streamlining room turnover, maximizing equipment usage and enhancing environmental controls.

Our Solution

Over the past three years, we’ve invested heavily to make our spaces smart — covering more than 11-million square feet with real-time location systems, adding cameras in all patient rooms, emergency rooms and operating rooms (ORs), and expanding into procedural areas, clinics and waiting rooms. Carts provide backup and extend reach to areas that aren’t hardwired.

The results are clear: new capacity, centralized use of scarce clinician and staff resources, and improved clinical and operational outcomes — all achieved with fewer capital and recruitment requirements. In our OR studies, smart-space analytics led to a 44-minute improvement in scheduling accuracy and 4,650 additional cases annually, demonstrating how intelligent infrastructure directly drives operational efficiency and access to care.

Next Steps

The future of smart spaces is about driving centralization and creating capacity — for space, clinicians and staff. From a technology standpoint, we’ve met the requirements of this vision. Now, our focus shifts to change management and operational transformation to create capacity and drive behavioral change.