Best Smart Rooms Products

As consumer and patient expectations continue to evolve, especially in light of hospitality trends, current hospital rooms are not keeping up. They can appear out-dated, impersonal, and uncomfortable for patients and staff.1  This current design can negatively impact clinical care and patient outcomes. However, this gap serves as an opportunity for design that supports care flows, operational models, and communication, and can lead to improved patient experience and outcomes, as well as benefit clinical staff experience and productivity.2  Through the implementation of smart rooms, hospital facilities can foster a more comfortable environment that also enables efficient operations for their patients and staff.

Improve patient care experience and outcomes

Patients are expecting hotel-like experiences to help with the belief that a more comfortable, personalized environment, promotes healing.3 Hospital smart rooms integrate the comfort of a hotel room with the sophisticated technology of a medical facility to offer tailored services that can engage patients effectively during and after their stay, minimizing the risk of readmissions.4 As patients feel more supported and engaged in their care, they can provide positive feedback of their experience which can improve Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores to help increase reimbursement rates.5 With the increased ability to monitor, regulate, and communicate, clinical staff can deliver the appropriate intervention at the right time, driving improved patient outcomes.

Improve care team experience

Healthcare staff today are experiencing alarming rates of burnout, capacity issues, and shortages that can lead to high costs for health systems.6 By leveraging the right technology, hospital smart rooms can significantly improve working conditions for clinical staff. When clinical staff are equipped with the appropriate tools–like monitoring sensors, communication appliances, and extended reality devices–they can get a clearer picture of patient needs and can better administer personalized care.7 By simplifying access to information and reducing administrative burdens, smart rooms help mitigate burnout and improve job satisfaction amongst clinical staff. An improved care team experience drives operational efficiency, which in turn enhances team experience and productivity, creating a positive feedback loop.

Productivity and operational efficiency

Hospital care today is labor-intensive and workflow issues such as delayed communications, redundant data entry, and inefficient patient care delivery are common in care settings because of the inability to efficiently bring teams together and design systems that are automated with little care team workarounds.8 These challenges often result in longer patient through-put times and extended lengths of stay. However, hospital smart rooms can facilitate efficient patient monitoring and patient-care team interactions through the integration of monitoring technology and real-time communication systems.9 These technologies enable care team members to coordinate care effectively and perform timely interventions without adding additional tasks to care team workflows. Additionally, with the enablement of patient-directed room control, clinical staff can also save time in administrative and operational tasks to be able to focus on practicing patient care at top of license.10 Improved operational efficiency drives better care team experiences, which subsequently boosts team productivity and satisfaction. As a result, hospital smart rooms can become a paramount for health systems to deliver high-quality care while managing time and resources appropriately to decrease patient length of stay and improve hospital through-put.

To successfully implement smart room solutions, health systems must begin by defining their guiding principles. It is crucial to prioritize the experience you aim to create for both patients and staff, considering the nuances of technology and how it will be utilized by all parties entering a patient’s hospital room. By keeping these factors in mind, health systems can effectively tailor their smart room initiatives to meet the needs and preferences of both patients and staff.

1. Ensure representation from all roles interacting with the patient in the room. Consider who the smart rooms are intended to serve and whose experiences they can enhance. This encompasses a broader spectrum of healthcare professionals beyond the patient and nurse, such as the physical therapist, pharmacist, case manager, and patients’ family members.
   
   
2. Be mindful of the space and design of the room to optimize care. Map the patient journey and interactions by conducting walkthroughs of the space and creating physical models to plan the design so that the added technology can enhance care delivery, rather than hinder it.
   
   
3. Know where you are going so you can pick where to start. The path to building a hospital smart room is not a binary decision and there is room for gradually assembling the ideal smart room through the incorporation of strategically chosen individual technologies that make up a smart room. To ensure success, it is crucial that health systems define their broader vision and top priorities to create a roadmap for technology selection, that allows for selection of platform solutions, and effective interaction between systems.
   
   
4. Do not overlook the infrastructure. Ensure that the current layout and infrastructure–from closets to electrical lines to broadband–can support new technological needs and additions.