The modern healthcare visit typically comprises a clinician facing a computer monitor and the patient waiting to be looked at. Altamonte Springs, Fla.-based AdventHealth is hoping to reverse this trend.
The health system is rolling out smart technology across 13,000 acute care rooms at 57 hospitals in nine states — the largest on record.
The organization is roughly 60% of the way through installation and expects to be fully live by the end of 2026. The rooms pair computer vision cameras, digital whiteboards and digital door signs, all tied directly to the patient’s electronic medical record and care plan.
“I think most of us have spent time either as clinicians or as patients feeling like [physicians or nurses] are staring at the screens instead of us as patients, and that’s the failure mode this entire project’s been designing against,” Valerie McKinnis, MD, vice president of clinical innovation at AdventHealth, told Becker’s.
“It’s really about trying to make the screens go away, and create technology that makes it so easy that I’m never logging into a workstation in a room with my back to a patient, but I am engaging the patient, especially with the digital whiteboard, so that they can see their X-rays and look at their X-rays with me,” she said. “We’re reviewing their labs in real time, and it actually decreases that disconnection with our patients that traditional care models have created.”
AdventHealth included front-line nurses, physicians and patient and family advisory groups in creating the blueprint.
“You don’t design around the clinicians, you actually bring them into the design process,” she said. “When you design around the people doing the work and the people receiving the care, you solve the right problems as you’re doing design.”
Nursing feedback reshaped what appears on the in-room whiteboard, prioritizing the information patients most want to see each day. “If it was an IT project, we would have failed. We want it to be a clinical transformation project,” Dr. McKinnis said.
Some of the most-used features originated at the bedside. On-demand translation — the ability to pull an interpreter onto a patient’s whiteboard — came from a nurse’s request, and clinicians are continuing to develop new uses for consultative and specialty care as the technology goes live.
Michael Cacciatore, MD, chief medical officer of AdventHealth, said smart rooms are about extending care “rather than replacing the human touch.” His advice to peers weighing a similar move: “Start with the patient experience, not the platform. … Treat smart rooms as a care model change, not just a technology rollout. … Technology should make care more human, not less.”
AdventHealth is deploying simultaneously across its divisions, with divisional and regional CIOs leading installation and informatics and training teams supporting go-lives, Dr. McKinnis said.
The pace at a given site is set mostly by its size — a 1,000-bed quaternary hospital takes longer to equip than a community or critical access facility. Most of the work is retrofitting existing rooms, which has required construction and rewiring.
The rooms will ultimately feature identical technology and capabilities. “We want the experience to feel the same for our patients and for our clinicians, regardless of where they are,” Dr. McKinnis said.
That scale is anchored by a single instance of Epic across all 57 hospitals — something Dr. McKinnis said made the rollout possible.
AdventHealth is launching virtual nursing on the back of smart room technology, and future capabilities could include expanded specialist access, deeper family involvement and eventually predictive analytics. The room itself could become “a member of the care team,” as Dr. McKinnis put it, adding a layer of clinical surveillance to help bedside teams detect patient deterioration sooner.
“We’re not just ever going to introduce features for a feature’s sake, but we really are going to be thoughtful about the next steps we take to improve the experience for our patients and make care safer and improve quality,” she said.
AdventHealth President and CEO David Banks has called smart rooms the “most transformational thing we’ve done inside a hospital room in my career.”
“I get excited when I’m in the hospital … to see the way that our docs and nurses are able to spend more time doing the right stuff that matters for patient care, less time on administrative details, and really connect with our patients,” Dr. McKinnis said. “It makes me so proud of the work that we’re doing to be able to see our patients connecting with their caregivers in ways that maybe weren’t possible just even a few weeks or months ago, because we’ve taken down some of the barriers in terms of communication and comprehensive care.”
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