Transforming care: from data silos to smart hospitals

5-minute read

A practical path to connect clinical data and support more coordinated care across the patient journey

In healthcare, organizational silos form when teams, departments and care settings operate in isolation, each focused on its own priorities, processes and information. This can make it difficult for clinicians to see the full picture and coordinate care across the patient journey.¹

Data silos have a similar effect in the clinical environment by leaving critical information fragmented across disconnected systems, devices and formats. This can result in limited visibility to information, challenges with care coordination and more effort spent piecing together context instead of acting on it.

Whether looking through the lens of sharing knowledge across teams and departments, or the lens of making information shareable across IT systems, the objective is the same: to advance more connected, responsive care across the patient journey, support patient engagement and improve the patient healthcare experience across care settings.

For healthcare leaders beginning the move from the constraints of data silos toward the smart hospital vision of more coordinated, connected, patient-centered and data-driven care, we’ve laid out a three-part, high-level roadmap that can help inform that progression.

1. Establish a trusted, usable data foundation

The healthcare industry generates roughly 30% of the world’s data volume.² Yet about 97% of the data hospitals produce per year goes unused,³ because it’s fragmented – spread across disconnected systems, devices and formats. Before interoperability can help turn data into meaningful information care teams can use, hospitals need a trusted data foundation. That foundation can also support healthcare data science by making information more consistent, usable and ready for analysis. That starts with clear definitions, high-quality datasets, seamless communication across IT systems and standard data formats that care teams and technologies can use effectively.⁴

2. Enable interoperability at scale

Digital health needs interoperability,⁴ because it’s what enables different IT systems, software applications and networks to communicate and exchange data.⁵ Full data integration, the ability to access all patient data within a system, is foundational to interoperability – yet many organizations still report limited maturity in this area.⁶ When interoperability is weak, patient data stays trapped, care can be delayed and administrative costs may rise, all of which can affect outcomes.⁷ To make interoperability work, healthcare organizations need a consistent way to connect systems so information, including patient journey data, can move dependably from where it’s created or resides (for example, the EHR, lab systems, medical devices) to where it’s needed across the patient journey. In practice, an integration approach creates a dependable way for systems to work together so clinicians can access the information they need, when they need it, to support more coordinated care.

3. Turn information and insights into action

Once information is shareable, the next question is whether it can reach the right person at the right time through communication workflows. In a smart hospital, interoperability helps break down data silos to turn data into useful, shareable information. It creates opportunities for automating communication workflows that can streamline and enhance the way clinicians receive and share information. By integrating communication tools with your clinical and operational systems, actionable information can be pushed to clinicians when and where it’s needed.

A connected platform, not isolated innovation

A hospital becomes smart when devices, data and people are unified at scale in a connected infrastructure.⁸

Our SmartHospital Platform is a unified digital infrastructure that brings together our intelligent sensors, connected beds and stretchers, clinical communication solutions and third-party systems, all integrated via our workflow orchestration engine. (Vocera Communications and care.ai have been part of Stryker since 2022 and 2024 respectively.)

Workflow intelligence, the heart of the connected infrastructure, integrates, aggregates and processes data from disparate systems so it can be accessed and used. AI-driven ambient sensors and a virtual command center work together to monitor, optimize and automate clinical and operational workflows in near-real time. Our clinical communication platform lets care teams collaborate quickly and effectively, receive relevant information to inform patient care and manage clinical workflow around the patient using real-time patient data. Analytics help leaders optimize communication workflows, reduce clinician interruptions, identify root causes of sentinel events and achieve clinical imperatives for improving patient care.

Getting started: questions for clinical and IT leaders to align on

• Where are critical patient and operational data still siloed?
• Which high-risk workflows are most impacted by delays or gaps in communication, especially during handoffs?
• How can patient journey mapping help us identify where a scalable interoperability strategy is needed most?
• Which workflows should we automate first?
• How will we measure clinical, operational, financial and patient satisfaction metrics to drive improvement?

Care transformation starts by listening to what care teams need: less friction, faster coordination and more confidence in the moments that define outcomes. The path from data silos to more connected, insight-driven care is built on making fragmented data usable, enabling interoperability at scale and applying workflow intelligence and communication so the right information reaches the right role in time. When devices, systems and people operate as one connected platform, clinicians can spend less time hunting for context and more time caring for patients.

Learn more

Stryker is one of the world's leading medical technology companies. Alongside our customers around the world, we impact more than 150 million patients annually. To learn more about the SmartHospital Platform, visit the SmartHospital Platform page.