Armed with a new $100 million donation, UT Health Austin (Texas) leaders told Becker’s they are well on their way to creating an “AI-native” health system.
Nvidia investor and board member Tench Coxe and his wife, Simone, gave the unrestricted gift Jan. 12, helping to boost the upcoming academic medical center’s goal of becoming an “intelligent” hospital.
“How can the built environment become part of the team instead of supporting the team?” said Claus Jensen, PhD, CIO of Austin-based Dell Medical School, one of the partners in the project. “That’s not an unreasonable question in a world where the boundaries between technology, people and processes continue to blur and intermingle.”
That might include predictive modeling, autonomous AI agents, and “ambient intelligence that whispers into your ear,” he said.
Officials plan to break ground on Austin’s inaugural academic medical center in early 2026, with the first patients expected to be treated by 2030 (one executive called that date “nonnegotiable”). The $2.5 billion University of Texas at Austin Medical Center will include the new UT hospital and an MD Anderson Cancer Center.
“We’re envisioning this facility that’s supported by the Coxe gift to really be an intelligent hospital that’s developed as an AI-native environment,” said Michael Ryan, chief healthcare technology, digital and data strategist at UT Austin and chief administrative officer of Dell Medical School.
UT Health Austin also plans to launch a new inpatient Epic EHR on the same day the hospital opens.
“We have the opportunity to not just reimagine but imagine what healthcare and healthcare delivery will look like at a time when we’re seeing the greatest transformation of knowledge and technology in the history of our planet,” said Claudia Lucchinetti, MD, senior vice president for medical affairs at UT Austin. “We see this as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine the future of health.”
Often, technology solutions are just “tacked on like a broken chassis and don’t really fix the problem,” she said; with the greenfield project, UT is building a 21st-century teaching hospital literally from scratch. With a population approaching 1 million, Austin is currently the largest U.S. city without an academic medical center.
But with ever-evolving technologies, leaders want to make sure the facility’s features aren’t obsolete by the time it opens. That could mean, as Dr. Jensen put it, “slightly dumber hardware and super-smart algorithms” that can facilitate whatever health IT advances occur by 2030.
“Historically, specialization was on the hardware side,” he said. “It’s easier to change software than hardware.”
It also means delaying some technology purchases. Mr. Ryan said he visited a recently opened hospital whose robots, bought a few years prior, were already out of date. Even hospital beds are constantly updating with new tech features.
“The other thing is rethink everything you thought you knew around power, electricity, network wiring: to integrate your networks as much as you can so you can plug and play different kinds of devices on them, to supercharge your electrical rooms,” Dr. Jensen said. “Because if you don’t supercharge your electrical rooms and your switch rooms inside the physical facility, it’s really hard to change over time.”
UT Health Austin leaders envision sensors that can visually detect when supplies are low and send out signals to refill them automatically, perhaps with robots. Or “contactless” vital signs that are monitored continuously. Or an “intelligent performance center” that goes beyond monitoring capacity and patient flow and acts as the data-powered brain of the entire facility, spanning operational efficiency to patient outcomes to clinical outcomes.
“It isn’t really one thing,” Mr. Ryan said. “It’s not like we’re going to buy cameras of brand ‘X’ and just put them in rooms. It’ll be more of a holistic, intelligent instrumentation of the environment.”
But at the end of the day, technology is simply an “enabler” and not the “starting point,” Dr. Lucchinetti said. “It starts with the patient and the care you want to give.”
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