The results are clear: new capacity, centralized use of scarce provider and staff resources, and improved clinical and operational outcomes — all achieved with fewer capital and recruitment requirements. In our OR studies, smart space analytics led to a 44-minute improvement in scheduling accuracy and 4,650 additional cases annually, demonstrating how intelligent infrastructure directly drives operational efficiency and access to care.

The future of smart spaces is about driving centralization and creating capacity — for space, providers and staff. From a technology standpoint, we’ve met the requirements of this vision. Now, our focus shifts to change management and operational transformation to create capacity and drive behavioral change.

(2) Connected Virtual Care

Connected virtual care is not optional. We spent five years building the “video highway” for our connected virtual care system: every room is equipped with a camera and its dedicated secure network. With the inpatient highway in place, we built programs in virtual ICU, telemetry, tele-monitoring, stroke, psych, pharmacy and hospitalists. Now, we will open the highway to all providers, leveraging the full power of connected virtual care.

What does the future of virtual care look like? We anticipate 20% of specialty care will move to virtual. It will also help redefine our nurse staffing model, requiring more flexible rather than fixed nursing ratios and moving from a task-based model to an integrated care model.

(3) Remote Monitoring

Our third bet piggybacks on the previous one of connected virtual care; it will only be as good as the remote monitoring that supports it.

By extending the virtual highway beyond clinic and hospital walls, smart wearables and tailored clinical programs will become integral for inpatient safety, home-based recovery and monitoring chronic care.

We envision that the remote monitoring market will continue to consolidate, leveraging single devices to address multiple chronic conditions. A health system and physician group must be prepared to monitor and push out care based on remote monitoring information.

(4) Care Traffic Control

We need a new way to manage and create capacity for our clinicians and our hospitals. We need meaningful nudges and real-time workflow management that get patients to the right place at the right time. We need scalable coordination that helps us focus on those patients who can remain in the community versus those that need to travel to the hospital. We also need to identify those patients who can get information, reminders and home checks versus those that need to come to an in-person physician visit.

To address these needs and more, we use a “care traffic control” center where we have centralized monitoring, virtual nursing and sitters for our patients. This set-up gives us a second set of eyes on our intensive care unit (ICU) and emergency department (ED) patients, remote monitoring to check on acute patients and limits telemetry to those who really need that level of support. Each of these programs have integrated AI that nudges patients and clinicians to take action when needed which makes the “care traffic control” center fiscally responsible.

The success metrics are undeniable: length of stay has decreased from 3.6 to 2.52 days, 30-day inpatient readmissions are down across all specialties and our mortality rate has reduced from 0.24 to 0.20. With its proven success, we are expanding this model across inpatient settings, our Accountable Care Organization (ACO) and patients in our physician practices.

(5) The Smart Chart

Our clinicians spend a majority of their day inputting data into the electronic health record (EHR). We must pursue perfecting the alignment between data and insights–where intelligence driving care decisions and actions are transparent, traceable and reliable.

In the next 24 months, we will be making a strong move away from clerical data entry by letting voice-driven conversations flow through generative AI programs to capture and apply full clinical and historical context that is not duplicative of yesterday’s information and even has coding recommendations. In addition, we must have smart summarization which allows the chart to work for the providers and provide meaningful information and digital suggestions.

(6) Clinical Intelligence

Imagine being able to identify a patient’s disease pathway from a single CT scan. With clinical intelligence tools, we are just scratching the surface on achieving these successes.

We will double down on delivering actionable insights for not only our cognitive-based specialties but also our image-based specialties. We will leverage computer vision imaging to significantly support our radiologists and pathologists in their interpretations, identify complex patterns and further enhance the care we deliver. We will use this information to send data more quickly to clinicians who can impact care such as antibiotic change, surgical intervention or medical support.

The ability to interpret information faster, especially when seconds matter, while also reducing cognitive burden, will be critical to support a growing baby boomer population and address ongoing provider shortages. Clinical intelligence will be unleashed with new AI models, and we couldn’t be more excited to be a part of that revolution.

(7) Smart Concierge

Hospitals can be complex environments, and coordinating care often involves many moving parts. We are redefining access with a digital-first, white-glove service.

Smart concierge means a digital agent will be the foundation and know when to use a human – digital first, human next. This approach has helped us move our phone team from one operator taking calls for four doctors to one operator taking calls for 10 doctors. This has dropped our time for new appointments from months to weeks and from weeks to days. We’ve already seen incredible outcomes from implementing this service, including over 22,000 appointments scheduled daily and almost 50% of all new patients needing primary or specialty care seen within 5-10 days. Creating opportunities for better and more seamless patient access to health care is one of our top priorities and smart concierge is helping us achieve that.

The opportunities for smart concierge are endless, from optimizing overall hospital operations, supply ordering, referral intake, HR inquiries, patient transfer coordination and more. Combined with a “care traffic control” approach and AI-driven data, we predict that many of our valuable operational areas will be enhanced with a comprehensive smart concierge approach and platform.

(8) Business Modernization

Hospitals and physician practices are a microcosm of every business infrastructure from transportation to billing; each is ripe for innovative redesign.

We took bold steps to modernize our infrastructure by implementing a next-generation ERP system as well as partnerships in revenue cycle, telephony, access and new partnerships in supply chain. So far, we have seen measurable results that are very positive, including 37% reduction in patient alone time and 23% more face-to-face provider-patient time than average.

Our future will be filled with drones in the sky delivering critical medicines, self-service scheduling and payment and AI-based support for patients and staff. We see this future as near-term, not long-term. When we talk about business modernization, it’s not just about reducing operating costs and inefficient processes. It’s about increasing the quantity and quality of time that providers must focus on making patient decisions and delivering the very best care. And just as we modernize operations, we must modernize how we reach our patients.

(9) Next-Gen Marketing

Today’s generation tells us that Facebook is “yesterday,” and today it’s Instagram and TikTok. Ads on TV are down, but streaming videos are up. The challenge is figuring out how to meet people where and when they get their information — that is the magic Next Gen Marketing must unlock.

We plan to pair our expertise with AI — predictive service-line authoring and modern channels — to turn marketing into a much more measurable growth engine with responsible use of technology.

(10) AI Agents: Orchestrators, not bots

Our tenth and final bet is agentic AI — next-generation robotic process automation (RPA), bots, automated agents or intelligent automation.

At Houston Methodist, we have been using agentic AI in scheduling, revenue cycle and hospital follow-up calls for a while now. In 2025, we had 7.6 million total calls to manage, compromising inbound inquiries, outbound scheduling, quality assurance and more. With our automation services in place, our patients reported a 95% satisfaction score for ease of scheduling, and we had a $9.5 million return on investment due to an increase in completed MRIs, CTs and mammograms. We also saw a 25-50% reduction in administrative costs.

While administrative functions are quickly mobilizing and adoption is seeing success, clinical use cases are moving more slowly. Adoption of agentic AI to replace physician calls or nursing questions is immature and has not moved the needle much on nurse staffing. One area we will stress is the success of text-based care pathways. For seven years, we have utilized over 200 text-based care pathways and seen over 80% current and repeat usage. We anticipate that we will expand and combine our successful text-based pathways with new agentic approaches.

In the next three years, we expect AI agents to support most of our key operations. This work is already underway and spans scheduling, registration, consents, revenue cycle, prior authorization and clinical support in physician offices such as medication refills or answering basic questions. Our key takeaway is agentic AI is new and can be costly if not used appropriately. That’s why we’re being deliberate about how, where, and when we deploy it at Houston Methodist. With thoughtful implementation, we anticipate significant efficiency gains across many areas while continuing to deliver exceptional experiences for our patients and providers.