Hospitals
As the nation’s health care landscape continues to shift, the “innovate or die” warning has never been truer for Houston top hospitals.
Be it forging new partnerships or embracing whiz-bang technology, experimentation has become the new necessity in health care to stay competitive.
“Either outsiders will disrupt health care for us, or we will transform ourselves,” said Roberta Schwartz, executive vice president and chief innovation officer for Houston Methodist.
Ranked third in the 2019 Chronicle 100 survey of hospitals, with just over 3,000 licensed beds and 114,000 admissions per year, Houston Methodist has launched a virtual Center for Innovation to explore new delivery models.
“Patient lives are changing, so is their health care,” said Schwatz.
As part of its look into the future, Houston Methodist will create a clinic room and a living room of the future to show how the two can be connected. It also has dispatched two robots, Holmes and Watson, for security duty and is testing another robot to deliver supplies in patient rooms to help free nursing staff.
“Our whole lives are based on our phones. Everything is easier than it was 10 years ago, five years ago, three years ago. Travel is easier, shopping is easier. It’s faster, more price transparent, but health care has been a very slow adopter of that,” added Deborah Gordon, chief administrative officer at Memorial Hermann Health System, which again tops the Chronicle 100 survey with its 19 hospitals.
“Our consumers expect more, and they should expect more. We have to do better,” Gordon said.
One of the big headlines earlier this year was the collapse of a merger between Memorial Hermann and Dallas-based Baylor Scott & White Health, a venture that would have created the biggest nonprofit health system in the state and one of the largest in the nation. While that deal ultimately went south, the idea to create better access to communities survives, said Gordon.
One Memorial Hermann initiative already under way is the creation of on-site health clinics for large companies to help workers better manage chronic conditions. An investment on the front end of health care is in keeping with the shift in this country from traditional fee-for-service models to value-based care where payment is tied to outcome, said Gordon.
At HCA Houston Healthcare, now neck-and-neck with Memorial Hermann in licensed beds, artificial intelligence has been pressed into service to solve the deadly sepsis challenge. The condition kills 270,000 people a year when then body’s immune system creates an overly aggressive response to infection. HCA hospitals have created a predictive algorithm to identify sepsis earlier, hospital officials said.
High-tech innovation like robots and artificial intelligence, along with more low-tech solutions, are part of the future of hospitals, health care advocates say. “Anything we can do,” said Gordon, “we owe it to our communities.”