Updating the information at the bedside, hand-writing infusion labels, tallying fluid balance, carrying specimens from one place to another - all of it is part of how a hospital runs. When patients are many and staff are few, these repetitive tasks become the obvious place to look for efficiency and relief.
At the second Asia-Pacific Healthcare Quality Forum in December 2025, Yun-Ching Fu, superintendent of Taichung Veterans General Hospital, described the hospital's smart healthcare work and how information integration, automation and process change address the pressures of high patient volumes and staff shortages.
He tied that work to patient value: using technology to support better outcomes while improving how resources are used. From nursing records to patient waiting, each application maps to a concrete need on the ward.
A patient's care information changes constantly, and if updating it depends on people swapping cards and copying text by hand, it keeps consuming time.
Taichung Veterans General Hospital connected e-paper bedside cards to the hospital information system so that care information updates itself, cutting out manual replacement and the trips that go with it. By Fu's account the application now covers every bed in the hospital.
E-paper infusion labels address a different problem: handwritten labels can be illegible or wrongly updated by hand. By synchronising orders and label content through the information system, the hospital aims to reduce those risks and support medication safety.
Both tools are about connecting information. When the system can bring existing data to where the work happens, the front line has less to re-enter, transcribe or replace.
For fluid balance, the hospital integrated measurement, calculation and recording into a smart monitoring system, with alerts for abnormal values.
Internal results Fu shared show the time required for the recording task falling from 60 seconds to 18 seconds, a reduction of around seventy per cent. The number describes the change in one specific task, and provides a concrete measure of the time saved.
From e-paper to fluid monitoring, a common approach to choosing improvements shows through: look at how information is produced, who moves or copies it, and which steps could be removed by connecting systems.
In the laboratory, Taichung Veterans General Hospital linked multiple instruments to reduce manual transport of and contact with specimens between steps.
This kind of design, Fu explained, answers the demands of high specimen volumes, helps lower staff exposure to specimens, and delivers results through the information system.
The scope of improvement therefore covers both the connections between instruments and how results are delivered. Whether specimen handling and data transfer run smoothly determines how much manual work the whole process needs.
Beyond internal operations, emergency department crowding and waits for admission are also on Fu's list.
The hospital tracks each stage of a patient's journey from emergency registration onwards, identifies the bottlenecks and adjusts accordingly. Following the path the patient actually takes lets the team see where the time goes.
A pre-operative preparation centre lets suitable surgical and procedural cases come in on the day, removing the need to admit patients the day before simply to prepare. Starting from admission scheduling, it improves both bed use and patient flow.
Reducing workload is also a matter of how services are arranged: some problems need the process itself redesigned so that patient flow and the use of beds and clinical resources improve.
Yun-Ching Fu - superintendent, Taichung Veterans General Hospital
In a busy intensive care unit, clinical teams have to keep track of a great deal of information at once. Taichung Veterans General Hospital developed an acute kidney injury (AKI) risk prediction model that combines vital signs, laboratory results and medication data to predict the risk of AKI in the next 24 hours.
Fu used a patient scenario from his talk to explain: when the system raises a high-risk alert, the team can look further at fluid intake and at drugs that may affect renal function, then adjust management on clinical judgement. The model supplies the clue; the response is still the team's.
The hospital is also exploring osteoporosis risk assessment from chest X-rays, trying to get more out of examinations already being done. The two applications address acute care and risk screening respectively, and both start from a clinical need.
Behind these applications sits a standing organisational arrangement. Since 2021 the hospital has run a smart healthcare committee with nine working groups covering management, big data, precision medicine, medical imaging, medical education, nursing, telemedicine, robotics and clinical applications. As Fu described it, each group meets every three weeks and the committee meets quarterly.
Care support also reaches outside the hospital. Fu described partnerships with 26 institutions in central Taiwan providing teleconsultation and home care, reducing unnecessary referrals and travel. From repeated tasks inside the hospital to trips patients make to reach it, improvement comes back to concrete time and resources, looking for what can be adjusted one step at a time.
