For most of its history, Hospital Sisters Health System operated as a collection of individual hospitals, each running its own operations, serving its own markets and maintaining its own workflows. The work of the past three years has been to replace that model with something fundamentally different.
Kathy Donovan, senior vice president and COO of the Springfield, Ill.-based system, says artificial intelligence is what makes that transformation possible at scale.
“I believe AI will play a significant role in that transformation,” Ms. Donovan said in a recent “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast” interview.
She described AI as the connective tissue of the enterprise health system. It’s the layer that absorbs administrative work and returns time to clinicians in a way that supports both the patient experience and quality outcomes.
The most immediate application at HSHS is ambient AI for clinical documentation. Across health systems broadly, ambient AI tools have expanded rapidly from early pilots into enterprise-scale deployments. At HSHS, the technology is being put to work in clinics and inpatient units, taking over the charting work that has historically kept nurses and physicians behind a screen.
“Putting AI in the clinics for charting, AI in the patient rooms that make the nurses and the physicians more efficient — they’re spending less time behind a screen and more time with the patients, touching the patients and their families, which then drives the patient experience higher and makes quality better,” she said.
That strategy is becoming familiar across health systems as getting clinicians out from behind keyboards and back into eye contact with patients produces downstream effects on patient satisfaction scores, on retention, on outcomes, that a narrow ROI calculation doesn’t fully capture.
The broader vision Ms. Donovan described is of a health system that leverages its full scale in ways that independently operated hospitals never could using technology, data and purchasing power as system-level assets rather than individual facility resources.
“The next generation of a successful system will truly operate as a full enterprise leveraging shared infrastructure, shared clinical expertise, technology, data, and purchasing power across the entire organizations,” she said.
That enterprise thinking also shapes how HSHS approaches growth. In an environment where building and acquiring hospitals is giving way to ambulatory investment, strategic partnerships and digital access, what it means to grow has shifted. HSHS recently opened an inpatient rehabilitation hospital in Green Bay, Wis., through a partnership with LifePoint Health, bringing a needed service to the market without building it independently. The system has also made notable gains on workforce retention and recruitment in recent years, a trend Ms. Donovan connects directly to the broader work of building a system where people want to stay.
“Growth is not just about getting bigger. It’s about creating a more connected, efficient and accessible model of care,” she said.
