Within the complex ecosystem of healthcare delivery, clinicians, caregivers, and patients remain at the heart of real transformation. Technology alone will not fix systemic inefficiencies. Through the Smart Healthcare Hub at Virginia Tech, we are taking a different approach. We see technology as a teammate in a crossdisciplinary strategy to solving the toughest challenges in healthcare delivery.

Our collaboration includes not only clinicians and medical researchers, but social and behavioral scientists, ethnographers, data scientists, tech experts, engineers, and creatives.

By working at the nexus of technology and human behavior — using algorithms and social science to identify new ways to understand the human dimensions of healthcare — we are combining quantitative insights with qualitative understanding to craft human-centered healthcare systems that are more data driven, efficient, and robust.

Through its unique approach to combining both artistic and technical minds to improve conditions for patients and providers — and using technology to achieve better patient communication and readiness — the work of the Smart Healthcare Hub directly aligns with Virginia Tech’s land-grant mission to serve our community.

Furthermore, our rural location enables us to study a population that is not currently well represented in healthcare delivery studies and may be a good proxy for examining healthcare delivery in the U.S. as a whole, as most communities do not have the robust medical resources of major cities. 

In addition to its strengths in medicine and leadership in biomedical innovation, Virginia Tech has long-standing recognition in many areas directly applicable to the work of the Smart Healthcare Hub. We believe that ingenuity arises when we work in multiple dimensions and from multiple points of view. The Hub is engaging with multiple VT colleges, including the colleges of Engineering, Science, Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, and Architecture, Arts, and Design.

The Virginia Tech Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) is home to a collaborative research environment called the Cube, a reconfigurable immersive environment that hosts research ranging from embodied data analytics to cutting-edge creative work. ICAT’s methods and capabilities translate well into other kinds of immersive environments, allowing the Smart Healthcare Hub to benefit from state-of-the-art simulations enhanced by projections and audio environments.

Future collaborators may come from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, which has extensive experience building multisensory testbed environments. It also has a deep history of human-centered design to optimize the human user experience, and significant leadership in biomedical innovation.

Our plan addresses issues in healthcare using perspectives and methods carefully chosen to yield the best possible medical outcomes. it centers on three research topic areas that are critical to the deployment of technology within healthcare across the world:

• Clinical AI Implementation: Creating frameworks for integrating AI into healthcare in a human-centered way, including a goal to become a national quality assurance lab for establishing best practices in AI implementation. 
• Immersive Simulation and Gaming: Using extended reality (XR) and GenAI for training and education in healthcare. This includes the Tesseract, a mobile version of the ICAT Cube, that provides 3D multi-sensory experiences to simulate exam rooms, waiting rooms, and more.

• Healthcare Data Privacy and Cybersecurity: Developing dynamic privacy protections for sensitive, multimodal healthcare data, such as security measures that will not introduce latency or affect system performance.

These areas are built on existing expertise and collaborations at Virginia Tech, and represent a convergence of research efforts across the university. We will address them via three crosscutting approaches:

• Systems Thinking in Healthcare
• AI and GenAI Analysis and Insight
• Human-Centered Design