Hi, everyone. This is Lucas Voss with Becker's
Healthcare. Thanks so much for tuning in to
the Becker's Healthcare podcast series. It's great to
have you. We're talking about interoperability
at scale today, the path to smarter
connected care. And I'm very excited to have
Scott Sagehorn on today. He's the vice president
and general manager of SmartCare Business Unit at
Stryker
Medical. Scott, thanks so much for taking some
time for us and being here today. It's
great to have you. Hey, Lucas. Glad to
be here. This is exciting. I'm I'm looking
forward to chatting with you. Yeah. We have
a lot of ground to cover today. I
do wanna start us off with introductions really
quickly. Scott, if you wanna go ahead and
just share a little bit about yourself and
and your work in health care.
Yeah. So I I I guess at a
really high level, in 2025, I led a
business unit here at Stryker called Acute Care,
and it was really our our bed stretch
of portfolio, and we've made some acquisitions over
the last
five years that would took us really down
deep into this digital pathway with Vocera and
Care AI. And so, like, right now,
at a high level, I I I lead
in 2026,
our smart
smart care business unit,
that sort of sits right at the intersection
of our connected devices,
Carrie, I, Vocera, and the broader connected portfolio,
our digital platforms here at Stryker,
good communication and and ambient intelligence. And so
my team's folks right now is really pretty
simple. We help health systems turn,
really fragmented
kind of capital equipment environments and point solutions
into
more connected,
more intelligence driven ecosystem,
solves problems for them, helps improve safety, efficiency,
and staff experience, things like that.
And I'm excited to have you on specifically
because you have so much experience
in making these turns. Right? And and you've
certainly had a front row seat to to
some of these major shifts in digital health
over the last couple of years, certainly, and
in 2025
as well and now into 2026,
as you just mentioned. As organizations
integrate
more advanced technologies,
some of them you've touched on just now,
how have you seen problem solving evolve at
the system level,
especially when we talk about safety and efficiency?
Yeah. I think one of the most important
shifts is that, you know, while the like,
the I call them the micro problems in
health care really haven't changed a whole lot.
Those macro problems,
have have really intensified, especially since COVID. I
think that was one of the the bigger
turning points in health care. And, you know,
the micro level hospitals have really always dealt
with things like pressure injuries and falls and,
cognitive overload and all all those, like, never
events that we hear about. And Stryker,
you know, frankly, we we make
a lot of really good products that help
solve for those and so do other great
med tech companies as well. And what's changed
is that,
leaders of health care organizations are now under
this intense pressure to solve
enterprise level problems. Right? So those problems that
those point solutions simply can't address on their
own.
I hear things like workforce shortages,
big issue post COVID variation in care,
delivering quality outcomes, and not not pre COVID
quality outcomes, but getting better than we were
pre COVID.
Cost pressures are a real issue right now,
and then operational efficiency. And so at the
same time,
you know, hospitals have already made a massive
investment in smart products, and they really proliferated
in health care here over the last five
to seven years, things like smart beds and
smart devices and smart pumps and
EHRs
and your your strategic digital platforms, platforms,
lab and workforce management. And I think the
frustration that I hear
more than anything is that they've made this
huge investment in all this technology,
smart technology, but it's still sort of operating
in silos, and they want more out of
it.
Speaking of silos, I think that's really critical,
especially when we talk about the clinical side
of things and and clinical teams,
especially.
What makes these technologies,
some of them, again, you've touched on just
now,
meaningful for clinical teams today? And where are
they starting to make the biggest difference, especially
when we think about silos?
Yeah. I mean, we we talk a lot
about ambient intelligence and automation across care settings,
and it's
we're just at the start right now. Mhmm.
I mean, the the the market is is
not mature right now. I think a lot
of the med device companies are learning alongside
customers, which makes an interesting partnership opportunity
as we do this thing together. But from
an AI perspective, I think Ambient Technologies is
is most meaningful when it sort of disappears
into the background, and it it gives time
back to clinicians. And when it becomes something
else that they have to manage, more clicks,
more buttons, more things to do, more things
to keep their eye on, it it fails.
And it's, you know, it's med device companies
that are specifically looking at these types of
technologies. You've gotta think about the workflow
and the amount of steps that people have
to do. So there's a lot of focus
right now on Ambient,
also as the the definition of smarter hospitals.
And a lot of the conversations that I
do have with customers is about making their
hospitals smarter.
And Ambient comes up quite a bit, and
I think it's a little bit of an
incomplete story when you bring Ambient into, like,
the single tip of the spear for smarter
hospitals. Ambient, I think, is important,
but it's clearly and and it definitely just
one input to helping hospitals get smarter. Like,
the value
starts to show being signals and the data
associated with that are are combined in a
meaningful way with,
workflows
and other product data and communication
Mhmm. I mean, it's across the system.
You touched on the usability piece, which I
think is so important. People to be able
to adopt something, people have to actually use
it and like to use it, which is
really, really key.
For you personally too and from your work,
what are some of those key ingredients of
an ecosystem that allows digital tools to work
together in a way that actually
reduces complexity, right, rather than adding to it?
What are some of those ingredients that need
to be there for this to all work
together?
I mean, I I I
there's a lot to it. I could tell
you that
most conversations that I have with,
folks at hospitals that are, you know, your
chief digital transformation offers, those that are thinking
about interoperability and they're thinking about
workforce management and AI,
they ideate a lot. Right? Because the sky
is the limit here with the things that
you can do. The technology is so good
right now, but I think good middleware becomes
a part of that. Right? When you're servicing
data, you're getting products to work to each
other. You're getting platforms to interoperate and work
with each other. So really good solid middleware.
I think about it as, like, infrastructure.
Right? The things that are critical to
helping hospitals get smarter, middleware is certainly a
big part of that. I think good communication
and how people
talk and communicate with each other is part
of that infrastructure.
The intelligence and the the information that lives
within products is really important.
Mhmm. You know, when we think about our
platform here at Striker, the smart hospital platform
that we're building,
being event driven is really important. And that
means when something happens in one system, whether
it's in EHR, it's on a product, or
it's in another,
strategic platform like a lab or or your
workforce planning platform,
all those other systems can react with each
other in real time. So an example of
that might be
if a bedrail goes down,
and it's not supposed to,
your
badge or your phone can get alerted. Right?
Pretty simple.
You know, that's that's a lot different than,
like, dashboards
that really are are prevalent right now in
health care that that tell you what happened
after the fact.
I think,
like,
really good solid real time analytics across all
of your domains is a really big part
of that infrastructure. So, like, when lab values
show up,
vitals come out of the ICU,
and device data all kind kinda come together
instantaneously.
You can sort of identify risk patterns in
things like sepsis,
you know, those those
risks and those events that happen in health
care. And you can do that without manual
interpretation delay, which is what real time interoperable
systems allow you to do. And I I
I also
I think that most
hospital executives that I talk to,
I think openness really matters. So hospitals
we know at Stryker that hospitals are never
gonna use Stryker as their only technology vendor,
and
it's rare where you'll find a hospital where
they have one tech vendor. So we know
that. Right? So the platform is has to
be ultra open.
It's gotta be developer friendly. It's gotta be
flexible. It's gotta be extensible. And, you know,
I I I know that that hospitals smart
hospitals
aren't templated. Right? They're curated. They're crafted, and
every organization has to be different. So I
think that
infrastructure that I walk through is is probably
the most important part with middleware being the
the really, like, central to that.
You talked about the the leadership piece here
just a second ago. Acquisitions and partnerships have
have played a a role across the industry
as as organizations look to expand their their
digital capabilities.
And I'd love to know this is really
important, and I love talking about this. How
can leaders determine
which innovations will meaningfully impact their organizations
versus those that might just be hype.
Yeah. And I I think that,
really, you can you can think about this
from a med tech leader perspective, but also,
hospital executives and hospital and health care leaders.
And I I think there's
really one
simple question that you can ask is one,
does does it reduce fragmentation in the system
or does it add to it? Right? And
I think we here at Stryker, we had
to look in the mirror,
on this ourselves. And, you know, Stryker, we
had hundreds and hundreds of of smart products
that were part of our advanced advanced digital
health care portfolio, and each one of those
products had its own platform, right, its own
deployment model. It's
the the technical debt for customers was was
heavy, and, you know, that mirrors the exact
problems that hospitals face right now. You have
thousands of products that have platforms and have
connectivity and have data,
and it becomes super fragmented in the amount
of technical debt that customers carry is intense,
especially on IT. And so we've made this,
a really deliberate decision here to move new
towards a a one striker, one platform,
and you're getting into the technical stuff, one
instance, multitenant cloud deployed. Right? One security model,
one install,
one connection to the EHR. It's really a
a big request from our customers. Like, hey.
We we are great customers of yours. We've
invested heavily.
We need to work from a technical perspective
with one striker. And so that's also why
we're not really trying we're not trying to
own everything. Right? We're not trying to be
one platform to to rule it all.
We're not betting on a lot of things.
You know, people talk about large language models,
and there's some work that we're doing with
some Stryker specific LLMs in partnership with a
handful of companies. But, you know, they're they're
your big five are gonna take that.
Maybe they get, you know, they they get
they become,
ambiguous over time, and and and they just
become commoditized.
We're not trying to become an algorithm company.
Instead, what we're doing is we're building a
platform here that can that can run whatever
models or algorithms customers choose because the the
the lim they're limitless right now. Right? And
we run them through our endpoints on our
platform,
other products on the platform as well in
a in a way that's
easy to manage and actually delivers value for
our customer. It's open. It's it's extensible. It's
flexible.
We'll work with anybody.
The The limitlessness
piece is very interesting too because I think
that that's so key for folks and, again,
the flexibility part that you just mentioned.
Is that what excites you most about the
potential of this model, and how do you
see it influencing decision making too as we
move into 2026
and and certainly beyond?
I mean, it it it it is a
big part of what excites me.
One, because of the flexibility and how things
are changing.
You know, one of the things that we
we hear a lot from customers is is
in which a an open extensible
event driven
allows them to do is kind of move
away from retrospective
data and information reporting into
more real time orchestration of events that are
happening. And, you know, on on the clinical
side, you can you can watch risk and
and flow as it happens. And instead of
waiting for, you know, that monthly report that
says we had too many falls, like, the
platform detects those types of things and those
patterns in in near real time, and it
automatically changes the work the way that work
is routed. And an example of that, I
think, is just
really dynamically
adjusting, like, routing patterns and escalating delays or
trigger triggering virtual support through the Curie platform
before a situation becomes a problem. And those
are real low hanging fruit that's, like, very
real and possible right now on a lot
of the technology that exists. And at the
enterprise level, I think leaders are finally getting
a single view of how their connected assets
and their workflows are performing across the system.
You can do a lot of things with
it. Right? And, again, we get into flexibility
and and things like that, but understanding which
sites or units are outperforming others and why,
and you see adoption and utilization of your
digital capabilities in real time, and you're you
you begin to build it sort of tie
your capital investments and digital projects to real
measurable improvements.
And I think in that world, right, and
we're like I said, we're at the very
beginnings of this. It's just gonna continue to
accelerate and get better and better over time,
but
a smart hospital platform is
is less a piece of technology, and it's
it's
it's more of, like, an operational, like, backbone
of the organization, and it gives executives a
lot of confidence. They need to make
bolder decisions,
right, to drive better care,
because they can see the impact and adjust
course quickly. So I I think there's I'll
I'll say one more thing here. I think
it also creates
choice and optionality, which is really important.
Like, organizations can start with and we have
a lot of customers that do this right
now. Let's start with one thing. Right? One
single use case,
bed exit, chair exit, hand washing.
And they can take that use case, and
they they can expand over time. And they
can do that without rearchitecting everything and creating
new connections into other products that they're bringing
into the use cases. And so
from an operational perspective,
that type of flexibility is is, I think,
essential in in the environment that we're in
right now where priorities are changing quickly, and
you know that. It's every week something's changing,
and having some stable architecture that allows flexibility
is super important.
Speaking of which, the changing landscape, I I
do wanna do a little bit of a
future outlook for here you two of the
I know it's it's a little hard as
you just mentioned. It changes every single day.
There's something new. Right?
Looking ahead, you know, three to five years,
what does success look like for hospitals that
are embracing this more connected intelligence driven approach
right now, specifically around care delivery? And and
what are some of those indicator that will
matter most for executives to see, okay, this
is actually
making we're actually making progress?
I mean, I I think
some of this is just my own opinion.
A lot of it is informed by customers.
But I
I think that
in three to five years,
successful hospitals,
you know, now a lot of your bleeding
edge customers will call themselves high-tech, right, which
they are.
But I think it sort of moves to
this,
and the hospital executive said to me to
this to me at one point, quietly intelligent.
Right? So the technology
feels
feels less visible,
but it's more present in in helping care
teams do the right thing at the right
time without constant friction, which technology
does create friction right now. It is a
double edged sword in health care.
I think success looks like
hospitals that can adapt quickly without sort of
ripping and replacing technology every few years.
I think from an executive level,
they're gonna look at at whether they've reduced
variation in care and stabilized their workforce challenges,
which is a real issue right now, improved
their their outcomes, like driving more quality outcomes,
and they've
simplified their technology footprint. There's just too much
tech in health care right now. It's gotta
get simpler.
I think they're gonna care about whether
all the new use cases, whether they're ambient
or communication
or product use cases,
if they can get deployed in just a
few days and and not months, which at
times it takes a long time to bring
these new use cases
into health care because of the amount of
change management has to happen. And
and and I think whether innovation feels additive
and not disruptive, and like I said earlier,
it can feel disruptive right now. I I
think those are big parts of it. I
I also think that, more importantly, that
they're gonna know they've they've been successful when
their their teams and their hospitalists and their
doctors and their nurses
say that this
actually makes my job easier. Right? The successful
organizations are gonna be the ones that can
evolve
without constant disruption, without friction.
And I think, ultimately,
success shows up when the clinicians have great
experiences and the patients are getting good
outcomes. Because if that technology
consistently makes work easier
and more coordinated,
that's a strong signal that the strategy is
working.
It's the ultimate marker of success. What are
the people saying? Are the people happy? Are
the teams happy? Which is really, really crucial.
Scott, it's so great to have you on.
I wanna turn the floor over to you.
Anything else that you wanna add that we
might have not touched on that's important in
our context today?
Yeah. I think there's probably two or three
things on my mind, and and,
you know, the the deeper you get into
conversations with the more progressive customers, the the
things that I've I've learned,
that if you're
at the beginning of your journey of helping
your hospital to get smarter, it might be
one single use case. It could be big
system of care,
workflows that you're working on is that there
there is no single blueprint
for a smarter hospital.
Right? I think the most effective approaches that
I've seen,
they focus less on prescribing solutions for their
caregivers and more on creating the conditions for
that intelligence and that innovation to emerge. Right?
That's a big part of why getting the
infrastructure,
is so important.
I think that means
investing in in more open and flexible infrastructure
that allows your data and your all your
devices and your teams to work together in
a way that that reflect the organization's reality.
You know, I I think once you get
that foundation in place, you can build really
highly customized end to end workflows,
whether it's for stroke care, critical care, or
just, like, everyday operations in a room. And
you do that not because someone
for you, but because the system,
can adapt. And and and getting that right
up front is really important.
I would also say that technology
is not it it is the easy part.
Right? Like, the real determinant of success is
is governance.
It's culture.
It's how you choose to use the platform.
It's change management. And I think the organizations
that get the the most out of their
technology from the smart hospital platform are the
ones that that co design those use cases
with clinicians and with operations and not just
IT or not just the vendor.
They treat the platform as a a long
term asset for them, and they build really
clear road maps.
Simple things at first that they can build,
improve efficacy on, and they build it on
top of that, and then they hold themselves
accountable to the outcomes and not just deployments.
Really important.
Scott, again, so great to have you on.
Thanks for taking some time for us today.
It's fantastic to have you. Yep. Thank you.
And we also want to thank our podcast
sponsor, Stryker. You can tune in to more
podcasts from Becker's Healthcare by visiting our podcast
page at beckershospitalreview.com.