Adopting and implementing every technology in the market is not what makes a smart hospital.
In his keynote presentation at HIMSS25 APAC, Dr Kun-ju Lin, deputy information security chief at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Linkou (CGMH) in Taiwan, shared their journey in building a connected, smart health ecosystem.
CGMH, he said, has been working to digitalise its systems for the past 20 years. In 2015, when they were assessed for their baseline EMR system maturity, they realised they were not close to becoming a smart hospital.
"We have the hardware, the PACS. In the front end, we do paperless [processes]. We had digitised all medical documents. But we barely drive powerful clinical decisions and use business intelligence, or even develop AI with our data."
Data were also previously siloed among individual CGMH hospitals, which made it difficult to aggregate data.
Following their Stage 6 HIMSS Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM) validation in 2016, the hospital started investing in building a consolidated data warehouse and enabling real-time data integration, data virtualisation, data recombination, and production of smart applications.
"A smart hospital does not put every technology into the hospital, like iPads, iPhones, or any mobile devices, robots, or AI agents," Dr Lin stressed.
What makes a smart hospital, he said, is culture change.
"Start very simply, like facing real clinical needs. Don't ignore that. Identify your clinical needs and try to get consensus. Once you have consensus, you can push a vision, a set of small goals that [your staff] can achieve."
Dr Lin noted that their staff was initially resistant to enforcing changes like adopting smart forms and implementing closed-loop processes. Eventually, they got on board after identifying their pain points.
For example, CGMH clinicians and staff had dealt with the challenge of creating copies as part of the documentation process. "We created a template builder so they can build their own template, and introduced an auto-fill feature, which allows them to just drag the information from the EMR automatically."
"If you want to change something, you can identify the pain points of your clinicians and respond to that with a methodology [aligned] with the HIMSS guidance," Dr Lin suggested.
He also recommended holding technology competitions among staff to incite culture change. "Since 2015, every year, we have been holding a competition with the use of smartphones. New ideas come up every year. And through this smartphone, they built not only smart templates; now, there are also large language models, an AI agent, CDSS."
Additionally, Dr Lin emphasised securing short-term wins, which he said would allow an organisation to reassess and invest more in these projects. "Eventually, it becomes a culture."
Ultimately, a tangible measure of the success of any IT project is when it allows clinicians to spend more time attending to their patients.
"Technology implementation can only succeed when it frees your clinicians and they can spend more time with their patients," Dr Lin said.
Besides the EMRAM, CGMH, Linkou is currently validated at the highest stages of three more HIMSS digital maturity models: the Digital Imaging Adoption Model, the Infrastructure Adoption Model, and the Analytics Maturity Assessment Model. Meanwhile, the hospital also achieved a perfect score in the HIMSS Digital Health Indicator in 2024.
