Reimagining the Hospital Means Every Hospital: Takeaways from the Newsweek AI Health Summit
It’s not a matter of “telemedicine or no telemedicine.” To quote the American Telehealth Association, Telehealth Is Health. I’m grateful to help carry that message, every day and through two unique opportunities over the past few weeks.
The first was the invitation to join the Newsweek AI Health Summit in New York and during the ATA’s 2026 Telehealth Awareness Week. The second was the opportunity to sit down with Investment Reports, featured by Newsweek, to discuss where virtual specialty care is headed.
My interview is featured in Hospitals Reimagined, a report culminating from dozens of conversations with hospital leaders, healthcare executives, and other medtech pioneers around the country and the world.
Reimagining the hospital must include every hospital and the care delivered outside of it. Telemedicine must play a role but only through differentiated execution. I detail what that means in my Newsweek AI Health Summit takeaways below.
Newsweek AI Health Summit Takeaways
1. Continuity Matters
Differentiated execution in telemedicine begins with dedicated physician teams, not a rotating “Uber” model.
The best programs are built around a dedicated group of physicians. The physician you call at seven should be the same physician you’re speaking with at five in the afternoon. Programs that schedule those physicians across multiple days create continuity within and between shifts, allowing the virtual physician to drive the care plan alongside the attending rather than repeatedly handing the patient to someone new.
2. Workflow Comes First
Investment Reports notes that one theme emerged clearly from its Hospitals Reimagined interviews: the future of healthcare will be defined less by technology itself than by how effectively hospitals integrate it into care.
I couldn’t agree more. Virtual care works when it fits how a hospital already operates, inside its existing EHR, technology, and workflow. Order sets, documentation templates and specialty-specific communication must support that workflow.
Working with a hospital’s existing infrastructure is the unlock that most virtual specialty care programs miss. Physicians must be able to document directly in the hospital’s existing EHR, no bolt-on system, beginning with their very first shift. They stay technology-agnostic, working within whatever cart and software the hospital already has.
Telemedicine programs built this way allow physicians to spend their time on judgment and care team integration, not documentation. They also allow hospitals to capture savings and ROI more quickly.
3. Healthcare’s Future Is Hybrid, and That Future Is Now
Acute care is a natural fit for telemedicine and, in many respects, is easier to provide virtually than ambulatory care. Outpatient medicine depends more heavily on longitudinal relationships. Acute episodes are more self-contained, which is part of why patients are too often discharged only to return to the emergency department without proper follow-up.
The key is to match the right model to each episode of care. A well-built telemedicine program will include multiple models including On-Demand Care, Routine Consults, Remote Study Interpretation, and Outpatient Care. This diversity can support patients with Parkinson’s (like my own father), deliver at-home care after a cancer diagnosis, provide remote monitoring for hospital-at-home care, and much more.
4. Shared Care Delivery Models Can Extend Reach
Think of the mobile industry’s friends and family plan: by joining together, everyone pays less. What if that worked for healthcare? Through telemedicine, hospitals can partner to create enough critical mass to justify specialty coverage, with each participant paying a share of what it would cost alone.
In the Great Plains region, eight hospitals participate in a shared alliance covering endocrinology and rheumatology, two specialties none of them could sustain on their own. Of course, execution is a challenge. Hospitals may have different technologies, contracts, legal requirements and economic priorities. It is an informal alliance rather than a common ownership structure, so annual budget decisions can affect participation.
Despite these challenges, the model works and it delivers.
5. Keeping Patients Local Creates Value
The Newsweek AI Health Summit included a panel on out-of-hospital care that explored where care delivery is headed: hospital-at-home, continuous monitoring, and more distributed models. It’s the right conversation, and the leaders driving it are building models that will change how patients experience care.
But there’s an important step between the hospital and the home: the community hospital itself. Every day, patients are transferred miles from home because a specialist isn’t available locally when needed. Those transfers disrupt families, strain tertiary capacity, and weaken the community hospitals that anchor local care.
Patient transfers are killing hospital margins, pure and simple. And yet, more than 25% of transfers may be preventable. They also cost far more over time than most hospitals expect due to ongoing locums coverage and physician recruiting to replace high-need specialties. The latter can take 4-12+ months for high-need specialties once credentialing is factored in, with lost revenue alone running $200K+ for every month that a position sits vacant.
Distributed care must start with keeping care local. That means giving community hospitals reliable access to specialty expertise, built into their workflows, so patients can be treated where they already are. As we move more care into the home, let’s make sure it doesn’t have to leave the community.
Case Study: Delivering Faster Stroke Care in the Stroke Belt
The ROI of any successful telemedicine program should be judged clinically, financially, and reputationally. Piedmont Columbus Regional is a perfect example.
This two-hospital system anchoring stroke care for Columbus, Ga. relied on community neurologists who were often offsite, with clinical decisions depending on second-hand information. After implementing a TeleStroke program with Eagle, Piedmont Columbus:
- shortened assessment-to-treatment windows
- reduced door-to-needle times
- now delivers rapid, real-time care at the patient’s bedside
These results are faster than national guidelines and have resulted in fewer transfers, even with a 21% increase in stroke patient volume. Today, Piedmont Columbus, strengthened by Eagle’s TeleStroke program, is a coordinated stroke network that continues to advance in community support, performance and recognition.
Clinical. Financial. Sustainable.
What Real Partnership Looks Like
The theme of Hospitals Reimagined as stated by Investment Reports was: The future of healthcare will not be defined by technology alone, but by how effectively hospitals integrate it into care.
My own themes?
Eagle has been reimagining the hospital in technology-agnostic ways since 2008. We started by providing nighttime hospital medicine support for one hospital in Bardstown, Kentucky, and 18 years later, we’re still there. Some of the original physicians are still caring for those patients. That’s what real partnership looks like.
Reimagining the hospital means no hospital left behind. Most Americans get their care at community hospitals, many without a data science team or a Chief AI Officer. For them, the pressing question isn’t which use case scales best. It’s who covers neurology tonight. AI can help, but its value to healthcare will be measured by how far it travels, not just how well it performs where it started. The flagships are showing what’s possible. Now the work is making sure that capability reaches every hospital and every patient who needs it. That’s real partnership too.
Thank you again to Newsweek and Investment Reports for the invitation and the conversation, one Eagle is committed to continuing and leading.
