A 100-bed hospital in the Atlanta metropolitan area has quietly become the model for the future of inpatient care delivery.
It all began with a question Emory Healthcare’s leadership team posed to Apple CEO Tim Cook: “Why aren’t Apple products used in hospitals?”
A good question without a good answer. Mr. Cook and Apple’s team decided to dig deeper and partner with Emory to test out new ideas.
“It’s natural that much of our daily life has been changed by Apple products. But there is a PC dominance in the EHR world. It was a paradox; we’d walk in with Apple products and then switch over to the PC for work,” said Joon Lee, MD, CEO of Emory Healthcare. “The same is true for patients and families. Making the switch to Apple focuses on the patient-centeredness of our experience and support the clinical workforce.”
Lithonia, Ga.-based Emory Hillandale Hospital is the first U.S.-based hospital fully powered by Apple products and integrated with Epic to reimagine the “hospital of the future,” designed for streamlined clinical workflows and a seamless patient experience. The hospital was intentionally chosen; it’s not an ideal academic setting, but more closely mirrors patient population diversity and resources of community hospitals across the nation.
“Emory Hillandale hospital serves a rich, vibrant community and we wanted to create an inflection in a community that we care about deeply. This was the right place to do it,” said Ravi Thadhani, MD, executive vice president for health affairs at Emory University.
Last year, Emory became the first health system to give clinicians access to Epic in the Mac App Store. The health system provided MacBook Air laptops, iPhones and iPads to clinicians across the organization to realize an annual savings of $300 per device in software licensing and support costs when compared with personal computers.
But just providing Apple devices wasn’t enough; to truly realize efficiencies and safety, the health system needed to develop new workflows, redesign patient rooms and reconfigure teams to achieve transformative results. Then a tragic event galvanized the team to action.
“The inflection point came about in July 2024, when Crowdstrike hit hospitals and companies. We had more than 20,000 devices paralyzed, but the Apple devices were fine,” said Dr. Thadhani. “Everyone wanted one of the Apple laptops and we only had 1,000 that we invested in for the test run. We decided then to pilot a floor and see what it would look like to integrate Apple and Epic in a seamless way. The feedback was tremendous. Nursing turnover from that floor was zero during the testing time.”
The partnership ignited multiple process changes, including more connectedness. Epic and Apple collaborated to allow clinicians access to Epic through Mac, iPhone and Apple Watch users to connect with others. Nurses can assist with patients’ vitals and manage medication administration through Epic’s Rover app on their iPhones. Each patient room is also outfitted with an iMac on a swing arm of each patient room for bedside charting.
Most staff members had Apple products and were intimately familiar with their workflows; so were patients. Emory Hillandale Hospital has taken advantage of consumer preferences by installing iPad devices with Epic Welcome app for check-in, and once they’re in patient rooms they can review medical plans, order meals and communicate with the care team through the MyChart Bedside app located on an iPad in the room.
iPads outside patient rooms provide critical safety information and can streamline handoffs between nurses. It was essential for Emory, Apple and Epic to work well together on this project. Team members from each organization met at their separate headquarters multiple times in the last year to ensure they’re getting the rollout right.
“For the first time, we have taken the best of EHRs and the best technology company – Epic and Apple – and merged them together in ways that haven’t been done before,” said Dr. Thadhani. “We are doing this with a focus on our patients and making a seamless integration of tech into patient care. We are also doing it for our workers and employees.”
One of the biggest pain points for clinicians was signing on to Epic from the Apple products. They didn’t want to navigate through multiple screens and apps to access patient records. The Apple and Epic teams worked together so the Apple product sensor would recognize the clinician’s finger print – just like it does on their iPhones – and open Epic “in a nanosecond on MacBook Airs,” said Dr. Thadhani.
The Apple products also integrate with one another so if a physician signs an order or updates a patient’s care, the nursing team gets a notification right to their Apple watch, which streamlines care at the bedside. The team collaborated to ensure technology accuracy and operational efficiency with redesigned processes. With every iteration, the team ensures the technology delivers on its promise for a longer battery life, data privacy and electricity use. Data privacy is particularly important, and all three partners worked together to ensure security of all platforms combined.
As a data-driven organization, Emory was poised to test the Mac against the PC to see whether one was better than the other.
“We had to take advantage of the ecosystem,” said Dr. Lee. “We weren’t just doing this as an experiment. We wanted to see how we could enhance the experience, speed and ease of use. If it’s going to work and make a difference, it has to make the process more efficient and friendly. It was critical that we maintain the advantage of the user friendliness of the Mac environment, which is what Apple is known for. It can’t be Mac equipment acting like a PC; that wouldn’t be the hospital of the future. It wasn’t just importing hardware and putting devices in the hospital and thinking that would work. It took work from all three companies to maintain the speed and consistency advantage.”
Dr. Lee also knew it would be important to involve many stakeholders, including frontline workers, in the decision-making process and technology integration. Nurses, physicians and other team members invested time and expertise into the pilot and then full hospital project.
“You can’t do this in a test tube or office,” said Dr. Lee. “You have to do it in a complex environment like the hospital. It required tight collaboration. Given the commitment for highest quality of patient care, we needed to make sure our frontline forces were involved from the beginning.”
Dr. Lee expects the “hospital of the future” transformation to extend beyond the partnership between Apple and Epic to create an environment where new technology can be incorporated in a disciplined way to quickly discover what works and what doesn’t. The team is now considering installing cameras with AI for fall prevention, maximizing large screen TVs, virtual communications and more.
“We want to examine the totality of this experience, quality of care and efficiency we think we can create,” said Dr. Lee.
