The Hospital of the Future

Beyond physician staffing, Spectrum's hospitals—like hospitals across the country—will also face the prospect of creating new nursing models as organizations struggle to hire enough nurses. The number of nurses in most hospitals will decrease, Van Vranken predicts. "We're going to have to find those clinical algorithms that will work to decrease the number of staff you need."

What does that mean for the future of hospital staffing in a broader sense? Hospitals will likely hire more support people for tasks that don't require a registered nurse—or, as Spectrum has done, they may find a way to tap workers from other roles and fast-track them to become nurses.

"We have an accelerated program for folks who have degrees. We can mint a nurse here in two years with a couple of the local nursing schools," says Van Vranken.

Technology's potential
The hospital of the future may be based in patient care innovations, but technology will be the thread that ties those innovations together. Improved clinical documentation, computerized records, and automated admissions will help make staff more efficient and minimize errors. Patient-monitoring devices will allow doctors to manage patients from afar, which may change the type of care that is provided in hospitals.

Until now, electronic medical record adoption has been spotty. But EMR systems will eventually become standard, says Amy Schwartz, a healthcare technology expert for Palo Alto, CA-based IDEO, an international design and innovation consultancy. "The whole records-keeping thing and paperwork is one of the biggest inefficiencies in the system," Schwartz says. "There's just no way that [electronic medical records] is not where things are going to go."

Technology has the potential to alter every department in the hospital. In operating rooms, for example, hospitals are already moving toward robotic surgery, which is much less invasive and has better results. This will change the entire look and purpose of the operation room, Schwartz says, because much of the support for the "operation" will occur outside of the actual room. "We're already seeing remote nerve monitoring in spine surgery where there's a neurophysiologist who's sitting anywhere—could be another country—looking at the signals from the nerve tracings," Schwartz says.

And while the procedures themselves may be simpler, the set-up is more complex, meaning that nurses of the future will have to be much more tech-savvy. Some experts predict that the position of chief medical informatics officer will become increasingly popular as clinical and information technology blend together.

Aside from such cutting-edge technologies, however, one of biggest technology-based improvements in healthcare will occur around something very basic: communication. Take Spectrum Health's new cancer pavilion, for example. The facility includes both hospital-based and independent practitioners in one building. All are connected under one unified IT strategy—something that is nearly impossible in a private-practice model, Van Vranken says.