Health systems are navigating a technology landscape that changes faster than most organizations can absorb it. But the challenge isn’t finding technology to invest in. It’s building the organizational discipline to define what intelligent care means, invest in the right things and sustain that model over time.
During a featured session at Becker’s 16th Annual Meeting in April, sponsored by Huron, leaders from Huron and Tampa General Hospital explored how organizations can move from technology experimentation to durable, digitally orchestrated care delivery.The panelists were:
• Elizabeth Brewster, principal in care transformation at Huron
• Pete Haas, managing director of healthcare performance improvement, clinical enterprise at Huron
• Angie Esbenshade, RN, principal, healthcare clinical transformation and nurse executive at Huron
• Sana Sweis, senior director of healthcare analytics and technology at Huron
• Lien Le, MD, vice president of hospital medicine and associate chief medical officer at Tampa General Hospital in Tampa, Fla.
Below are four takeaways from their conversation.
1. Innovation is strategy
Mr. Haas opened by pushing back against the tendency to relate intelligent care to any particular technology solution. From Huron’s perspective, intelligent care means digitally orchestrating care delivery differently across the enterprise.It’s the process of integrating people, workflows and technology into a coordinated system rather than layering disconnected tools on top of existing infrastructure. The model encompasses three interconnected pillars: an intelligent care operations hub that manages system-wide logistics and flow; virtual care delivery spanning hospital-at-home, virtual nursing and remote patient monitoring; and smart hospital infrastructure that future-proofs physical assets for the pace of digital change.“Organizations know they need to operate differently and they need to do that in a digitally enabled way,” Mr. Haas said. “But they cannot lose sight of the people, process and the organizational structure behind it.”
Building on this, Dr. Le underscored that effective innovation must be both disciplined and durable, noting that technology adoption should be guided by formal evaluation frameworks to ensure solutions address defined problems, deliver measurable return and mitigate unintended outcomes.
“A strategy for innovation is not like a fad,” Dr. Le said. “You have to commit to it. You have to put investment, both people and financial resources, behind it to sustain that strategy.”2. ROI requires specificity
The panelists agreed that executive alignment depends on clearly defined financial and quality outcomes tied directly to the tool or workflow in question. Mr. Haas described a growing expectation for multi-year pro formas that translate technology investments into organizational impact, not just percentage improvements in aggregate metrics.Ms. Esbenshade added that ROI in intelligent care extends well beyond staffing ratios to encompass quality, patient safety and clinician recruitment and retention. While harder to quantify, these results are no less real. She described a virtual nurse who detected stroke symptoms during a patient check-in and activated a code stroke before a bedside nurse would have reached the room.“Think about the time that could have been wasted before the bedside nurse may have been in that patient’s room to recognize it,” Ms. Esbenshade said. “This moment is saved and lives are saved just because of being able to act quickly. Those are the components that sometimes it’s hard to put an ROI to.”Dr. Le also raised a dimension that rarely appears in vendor contracts: the cost borne by frontline staff during deployment. Training time, workflow disruption and hours spent troubleshooting can significantly undermine sustainability. “That cost, if you don’t quantify it and don’t understand it at the very beginning, it’s very difficult to sustain once you deploy,” she said.
3. Why assessment matters
With health system leaders receiving a constant stream of vendor pitches, Ms. Sweis argued that the only reliable filter is a disciplined assessment of what the organization already has, how well it is being used and where the genuine gaps are.Without that foundation, technology accumulates rather than compounds. According to Ms. Sweis, organizations build dashboards and analytics platforms only to find 80% of those tools unused two years later. The assessment should produce a prioritized list of operational and clinical gaps, which then becomes the standard against which any new solution is evaluated.“If companies are contacting you for a shiny new tool,” Ms. Sweis said, “does that address one of the gaps in operational goals that were generated from the detailed assessment?” For Ms. Sweis, the technology landscape is moving too fast for a snapshot to remain useful for long.
4. Adoption starts with the end user
Several panelists cited adoption failure as the most common and preventable outcome of technology deployment and traced it consistently to the same cause: end users who weren’t engaged until after key decisions had been made.Dr. Le shared a candid example from Tampa General, where a physician scheduling tool was embraced by one clinical team and rejected by another — not because the technology was flawed, but because the second group’s workflow required a different interface that no one had thought to ask about.Ms. Esbenshade drew on a principle from the Magnet nursing framework to name the pattern. “Don’t make decisions about us without us.” She described the experience of forging ahead with well-intentioned initiatives only to look back and find no one had come along.Ms. Brewster extended that point to the organizational level, describing health systems that build out intelligent care capabilities across multiple markets only to find each region has developed its own one-off processes. The antidote is standardization, creating uniform workflows that enable systemness.
The panelists closed with a shared emphasis on continuity. Technology assessment isn’t a one-time effort, the vendor landscape will keep evolving and the organizations that sustain impact are those that keep returning to the same foundational questions.
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