Smart Hospital Workshops for Care Pathways

Smart hospitals do not start with screens, sensors or apps. They start with alignment: a shared view of which journeys matter most, where there is friction and what success looks like for patients, clinicians and operators. Hospitals are mission critical buildings where every delay and every inefficiency eventually reach the patient. Yet smart ambitions are still often defined late, after floor plans are fixed and systems are already being specified. That is when smart becomes a shopping list instead of a strategy.

At Deerns we use Smart Hospital Workshops to bring stakeholders together early and translate lived experience into a roadmap to inform smart hospitaldesign . The workshop is a focused, facilitated working session that helps a client define ambitions, prioritise investments, and create a smart-ready foundation that can be implemented in phases. and create a smart-ready foundation that can be implemented in phases.

For Deerns, this approach connects to our smart building expertise and to the Blue Hospitals vision, where smart and green design principles are integrated to maximise hospital performance., where smart and green design principles are integrated to maximise hospital performance where smart and green design principles are integrated to maximise hospital performance.

What clients gain from a Smart Hospital Workshop

Each group in a hospital journey sees different problems and proposes different solutions.

Without a structured method, digital initiatives fragment into local optimisations, leaving building and MEP design to guess future needs and increasing the risk of costly retrofits.

The Smart Hospital Workshop addresses this by helping the organisation to define ambitions and agree on priorities before the project moves forward. The Workshop is part of our Smart Hospital Quickscan approach, which helps all stakeholders to both understand the current status and define an upgrade or investment plan.

The value is less about a single technology and more about decision quality.

In practice, a good workshop produces 3 key outputs that are immediately useful for governance and design:

• Shared ambition, expressed in clear use cases tied to real journeys rather than abstract concepts
• Prioritised short list of interventions, separating what must be designed in now from what can be added later
• Smart-ready baseline and programme of requirements for building and ICT infrastructure, so future services can connect without disruption.

This process also becomes a risk management tool. It reduces scope creep, avoids misaligned procurements and builds internal ownership because the solutions are co-created by the people who will use them.

The Jakarta client case: turning experience into ambition

A strong example comes from a Smart Hospital Workshop held in Jakarta for the JEC Eye Hospitals & Clinics Sanur project in Bali, delivered through the Emerald Hospital Design partnership: Deerns, Dutch Health Architects and TeamworX Indonesia. With around 50 participants, the client treated smart ambition as a leadership topic.

Deerns prepared journey steps tailored to the clinic and aligned them with the client so that teams started from the same baseline. Working in groups, participants refined three key journeys – outpatient, surgery and doctor – reflecting the tight constraints of an eye clinic.

Instead of debating whether a hospital should be smart, they pinpointed where value is present: access and arrival friction, waiting time uncertainty, manual handovers and limited visibility of people, assets and information. Deerns then translated these needs into smart building and digital patterns to guide the next project stages.

Recurring themes and solution patterns

Across the journeys, a consistent cluster of challenges emerged: disconnected data, manual processes, delays and communication gaps. The workshop helped move the conversation from symptoms to system-level solutions.

5 important themes were revealed:

• Digitalisation of front-end touchpoints, including clearer wayfinding and self-service tools to reduce friction and improve flow predictability.
• Integrated data as a single source of truth, using central platforms and dashboards that connect scheduling, operations and asset information.
• Improved time management through automated reminders, queue management and smarter booking to reduce missed appointments and bottlenecks.
• Asset and logistics visibility with tracking and controlled storage, reducing time lost searching for critical equipment.
• Environmental intelligence using sensors and smart controls to support comfort, indoor air quality and energy performance without adding workload.

Not every capability needs to be implemented on day one. What matters is that the infrastructure, interfaces and governance allow phased adoptionas clinical services evolve.

Lessons learned from the client perspective

The Jakarta case highlights 5 key lessons for clients shaping their own pathway:

• Start early. Smart requirements influence space, MEP capacity, ICT rooms, cabling pathways and cybersecurity architecture.
• Use journeys to keep the conversation operational and human.
• Design for data readiness, including ownership, integration standards and governance.
• Build smart-ready infrastructure, then phase capabilities.
• Treat smart and sustainability as one discussion.

A workshop as an engineering lever

Smart Hospital Workshops succeed when treated as an engineering lever: converting operational reality into requirements that design teams can deliver. Hospital teams can use this as a bridge between vision and implementation, aligning medical, operational and technical stakeholders.