South Korea’s smart hospital concept: focus on patients’ needs and experience
Developing smart hospitals has been a way for South Korea to meet the growing demand for more personalized healthcare in their rapidly aging society.
Leading this effort is the Korea Health Industry Development Institute (KHIDI), an agency under the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The lead researcher, Jong Yeob Kim, shared how they are promoting smart hospitals in South Korea HIMSS24 APAC session, “Patient-Centered Healthcare Transformation Based on Sustainability: Insights from Korea’s Smart Hospital Initiatives.”
KHIDI conducted a pilot with the smart hospital project in 2020. This involved 17 partner hospitals that were supported in their transformation into smart model hospitals. The project has also developed and deployed 74 smart hospital tools since its launch.
Kim said in Korean that their smart hospital agency wants to “use various technologies to improve the quality of healthcare services, reduce staff workload and increase the hospital’s operational efficiency, so that patients will have a positive experience during their journey from admission to hospital admission. disposal.”
The emphasis on improving the patient experience, he says, is what differentiates a smart hospital from a digital hospital.
A smart hospital, Kim said, is also “not just one entity.” KHIDI carried out 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 to local communities. This places the individual smart hospital at the center of the smart ecosystem.
“Our ultimate goal… is not to make one hospital smart. We aim to improve the efficiency of the country’s entire medical service. And with smart hospitals at the center, we are on our way to providing the public with better medical services.” quality.”
Findings from the process
Now KHIDI has been working to replicate the concept in other hospitals across the country. Part of this effort is developing an evaluation model to measure the effectiveness of the smart hospital concept. It has six points: technological value, data, operational efficiency, quality of medical services, user experience and post-implementation.
Findings from the project evaluation showed that there was an overall positive impact on patients and staff.
“Nurses, doctors and hospital staff working in extremely harsh and dangerous conditions have reported that their stress has been significantly reduced by this system,” says Kim. Hospital workers, he noted, also showed greater loyalty and more time spent providing patient care.
“An environment has been created where employees can focus on the actual nursing work. We also found that there was an effect of reducing unnecessary working time by approximately half.”
The agency, Kim said, was also surprised to receive positive feedback from patients, who even agreed to expand the smart hospital concept across the country.
“We were afraid that there would be some resistance to digitalization, as hospitals have many older patients. But when we actually conducted a national patient survey, many said it was very useful and that these smart hospitals should expand in the future.”
Patients also felt that a smart hospital provided better services than the others.
Additionally, an increase in the adoption of digital technologies was observed, further enabling patients’ proactive involvement in their care.
“(The trial of the smart hospital concept) shows that we can (potentially) receive high-quality medical services not only by going to large hospitals, but also by receiving such services in local smart hospitals in the regions (outside major cities ),” Kim emphasized.
Digitizing at the right time
It goes without saying that transforming hospitals into smart hospitals is not an easy task. Kim emphasized the importance of getting the right technology at the right time.
“No matter how good a technology is, if it’s a technology that can’t be used in hospitals, it may be premature, so we moved forward with models that we could implement right away,” Kim said. For example, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, there was a clear focus on enabling telemedicine, implementing smart infection control and ensuring efficient management of hospital resources in a smart hospital.
“Our goal (has always been) to provide services by efficiently using the right technology at the right time, with the right people, in the right place.”