Huashan Hospital: A Journey of Collaborative Digital Transformation

This case focuses on Huashan Hospital's digital transformation, examining how it integrated technology into medical services, combined top-down planning with bottom-up innovation, and fostered cross-departmental collaboration across multiple campuses. To overcome geographical constraints, Huashan Hospital experimented with a multi-campus management model and introduced a "virtual consultation platform," followed by the launch of an "Internet Hospital." To bring together specialist resources, the hospital utilized digital technology to promote multi-specialty collaboration and manage multiple campuses, as seen in the development of a hospital-wide, cross-departmental blood glucose management platform. Believing in collective wisdom, Huashan Hospital nurtured a culture of inclusion and openness, encouraging frontline medical staff to apply digital technology to drive patient-centric innovation. Despite being Shanghai's smallest public hospital, Huashan Hospital moved into the national top 10 hospitals and the top 20 in outpatient and emergency room visits (2021) in its quest for a collaborative digital transformation. However, in order to fulfill the objectives of the 14th Five-Year Plan for Smart Hospital Construction, Huashan Hospital's management faced several questions: Although it had invested sparingly in its Information Center and offered few incentives despite the center’s leading role in the smart hospital initiative, how should Huashan Hospital now position its Information Center to unlock its full potential? Moreover, while the model of cross-departmental collaboration demonstrated by the blood glucose management platform had been replicated internally, a new issue surfaced: How to effectively manage these data-driven cross-functional teams? Finally, how could digital technology be leveraged to support the management of a smart hospital across multiple campuses?