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By Alexis Kayser
Healthcare Editor
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Watch the full webinar, "What Makes a Smart Hospital?" above, or access an on-demand replay here.
Hospitals around the world have invested heavily in artificial intelligence, automation, telehealth and digital patient tools. In many cases, the technology is already there.
The problem is getting people to use it.
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That gap between adoption and implementation emerged as a central theme during Newsweek's September 3 webinar, "What Makes a Smart Hospital?" presented by Cognizant. Executives from Samsung Medical Center (Seoul, South Korea), Sheba Medical Center (Ramat Gan, Israel) and NYU Langone Health (New York City) joined global data and research company Statista to discuss what separates isolated digital projects from health system-wide transformation.
Data from Statista's latest Smart Hospitals Digital Maturity Survey—used during the scoring process of Newsweek's annual World's Best Hospitals ranking—suggest that access to advanced technology is becoming nearly ubiquitous among participating hospitals. But when researchers measured how extensively those technologies had actually been implemented, the numbers dropped sharply. Almost no hospitals reported full implementation across all of the survey's subcategories.
Teleconsultation offers one example. Eighty-two percent of surveyed hospitals reported some level of implementation, but more than 53 percent said it was used in fewer than one in 20 consultations. Among the survey's leading hospitals, one-third said more than 20 percent of consultations involved teleconsultation.
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Across countries and regulatory environments, the common denominator among digitally mature hospitals is less flashy than the latest AI application, according to Dr. Joshua Stevenson-Hoare, leader of Statista's health care analysis team.
“What we see as universal is that underpinning structure,” Stevenson-Hoare said. “I just don't think you can reach the high levels of smart maturity...if you don't have that structure underneath it.”
That includes data storage, network security, interoperability and internal communications, he said.
The other speakers agreed that buying or testing a technology does not make a hospital "smart." Integrating it into routine care, getting clinicians and patients to use it and proving it improves outcomes at scale might.
"Pilots are relatively easy," said Dr. Eyal Zimlichman, chief innovation and AI officer at Sheba Medical Center and the founder and director of ARC Innovation.
Hospitals can typically find an enthusiastic clinician willing to test a new tool, Zimlichman said. The bigger challenge comes when an organization tries to move from reaching one or two percent of patients to 20, 30 or 50 percent. At that point, health systems must contend with legacy technology, connectivity and change management across large workforces.
NYU Langone Health has gone so far as to largely dispense with the word "pilot."
Dr. Paul Testa, the system's chief health informatics officer, said NYU Langone instead thinks in terms of proofs of concept. A technology that works in several units has not truly proven itself, he argued, until it can be scaled across the organization.
"We're not afforded the privilege to simply play in the corner with the cool new shiny button," Testa said.
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That means considering scale from the beginning, including whether a product could eventually serve millions of patients, operate across multiple care settings and function in different languages.
NYU Langone recently put that approach into practice with ambient documentation. The health system tested three vendors before choosing one that is now being used at scale across its environments. Testa expects similar technology to expand further into nursing, where ambient tools could capture evidence of bedside care directly in the medical record.
Samsung Medical Center, meanwhile, has scaled digital tools by embedding them into what happens before a patient enters an exam room.
The South Korean hospital began building on patients' pandemic-era familiarity with submitting information digitally by sending questionnaires before outpatient visits. It then added reminders and integrated responses into clinical workflows.
The program, which began in urology, is now used across 34 departments. Samsung sends roughly 4,000 to 5,000 questionnaires per day and sees a response rate of approximately 85 percent, according to Dr. Wonchul Cha, the hospital's chief innovation officer.
For Cha, the value of those investments ultimately comes down to time savings.
"Respecting the patients is respecting their time, [and] respecting the provider's time," he said.
That could mean reducing the time patients spend waiting for care or using automation to keep nurses from spending valuable hours on lower-value tasks such as counting and stocking supplies.
Sheba is pushing that idea beyond the hospital's physical walls.
About 20 percent of the Israeli medical center's beds are now virtual, Zimlichman said. Some wards operate as hybrid units, with the same team caring for patients in traditional hospital beds and higher-acuity patients receiving care at home.
His longer-term vision is a "hospital without walls" in which much of a patient's relationship with a health system takes place wherever the patient happens to be. AI could eventually handle a significant share of routine interactions, he said, allowing human clinicians to concentrate their attention where it is most needed.
But the panelists cautioned against equating more AI with greater maturity.
"Being smart, I believe, is admitting that you have many unsmart parts," Cha said.
AI is moving in "giant steps" while hospitals are still learning how to work alongside it, he continued. That requires health systems to monitor not only where AI improves care, but where reliance on the technology may introduce new risks or change clinicians' skills and behaviors.
Zimlichman added that transformation also requires a CEO-backed roadmap with clear priorities and milestones; Testa echoed that such a roadmap should not belong to IT alone but connect technology investments to organization-wide goals such as quality, efficiency and patient experience.
"A smart hospital isn't a goal," Testa said. "It's a result."
Statista's Smart Hospitals Digital Maturity Survey is re-opening for participation. Responses are included in the evaluation for World's Best Hospitals 2027 in partnership with Newsweek.**
The survey will be open from September 21 - November 4, 2026.
Click here to register and receive an invite.
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