Hospital of the future

‘St. Mary’s Hospital will grow
beyond a healing place’

Seung Ki-bae

President of Seoul and Yeouido St. Mary’s Hospitals

Seung Ki-bae, one of the most renowned cardiovascular specialists in Korea, has led a major reform of Seoul and Yeouido St. Mary’s Hospitals since he became the president in 2015. He believes they should be an “integrated biomedical platform” that can embrace anything and everything about the field.

The hospital of the future may not look like a hospital at all. It will use more technologies in almost all areas; triage and surgery, for example, may be done entirely by an artificial intelligence (AI) device. But important changes will happen in the hospital’s purposes and functions, according to Seung Ki-bae, the president of Seoul and Yeouido St. Mary’s Hospitals. “In the future, big hospitals will turn into something like biomedical platforms that can embrace anything and everything about the field,” he said in an interview. “Their primary function will change from providing medical care to sharing research ideas and results.” In other words, hospitals will serve as a platform for other entities (such as research institutions and medical device firms), as well as an input provider that can, for instance, help biomedical businesses develop or improve. Seung believes major hospitals will move inevitably toward that direction. “Think about it. Hospitals are the best institutions to collect biomedical information because they are the ones that attract sick people. Also, doctors are the best people that can turn such data into something useful and practical. Doctors know what they and their patients need better than anyone else,” he said. Under his watch, Seoul and Yeouido St. Mary’s Hospitals are already working to bring this vision to life. As a first step, Seung is trying to integrate the operating systems of the two hospitals under Catholic University of Korea — one in Gangnam District and the other in Yeongdeungpo District. The core of the scheme, which is called “One Hospital System,” is to share patients’ medical information and try to find the best treatments for them based on the combined resources of the two hospitals.

For example, a patient who needs a bone marrow transplant can get the necessary check-ups in any of the two hospitals but will receive the surgery at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, which is better equipped for such operations. On the other hand, a patient with a rare or chronic disease will receive treatment mainly at Yeouido St. Mary’s Hospital. “For patients, the biggest advantage of the system is consistent treatments and access to the best possible medical services of the two hospitals at each treatment stage,” Seung said. “The integrated system allows medical workers to share patients’ medical information immediately and to work closely together to help them get back to life.” The system also reduces unnecessary tests and therefore medical costs for patients, he noted.

For hospitals, the system means more biomedical data and more know-how about efficient data management. None of the two St. Mary’s hospitals is the largest one in Korea. But together, Seung believes, they can have a significant edge over other major hospitals as a research data collector and manager, which will become increasingly important in the future. If One Hospital System proves to be a success, it could expand to all 39 hospitals and clinics of the Catholic University of Korea and beyond. “Global research-focused hospitals, such as M.D. Anderson, Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins, focus more on strengthening their networks than on purchasing more devices and building more complexes,” he said. Ultimately, Seung wants to create a single, widely trusted hospital brand for the Catholic University. As part of the effort, he has adopted a regulation that requires all doctors in both hospitals to wear the same uniforms. One might be concerned that less expenditure for patients mean less revenue for hospitals. But Seung disagrees, believing the hospital’s main revenue resources will inevitably have to change. “Research data and results can be used to facilitate tomorrow’s healthcare innovations, such as developing new drugs or medical devices,” he said. In the long run, he noted, information and ideas would create the most revenues for hospitals. In 2014, Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital won two research grants for medical device projects from the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy. The grants will give the hospital a total of 14.7 billion won ($13.1 million) in funding until 2019. The hospital-affiliated Catholic University of Korea College of Medicine also received 61.7 billion won in research funds in 2014, the country’s third highest, after Yonsei University College of Medicine and University of Ulsan College of Medicine. Seung plans to continue to increase investment in the hospitals for other research areas, such as stem cells and dementia. His management philosophy is that every penny that comes from patients should eventually be used for them and should not go to the hospital’s profits. “Giving is the spirit of Christianity, and that spirit is what built a Catholic hospital in the first place,” Seung said. “Eighty years ago, when almost everyone was poor, Christians chipped in to build a 24-bed hospital in Myungdong. That’s how the hospital was born.”

A renowned cardiovascular specialist

Seung is one of the most renowned cardiovascular specialists in Korea, along with Park Seung-jung, the interventional cardiology director at Asan Medical Center. In his study, details of which were reported in his paper “Stents, versus Coronary-Artery Bypass Grafting for Left Main Coronary Artery Disease,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2008, Seung demonstrated that stent implantation is safe as a surgical method in a three-year period. In collaboration with Park, he conducted another study, details of which were reported in the article “Randomized Trial of Stents versus Bypass Surgery for Left Main Coronary Artery Disease,” published in the same journal in 2011, providing additional support for his previous study’s finding.

The field of vascular diseases is one of the key areas that Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital will focus on. “The field showed the biggest rate of growth in 2015, only after orthopedics. With the nation’s rapidly aging population, the field is expected to continue to grow,” Seung said. “Along with bone-marrow transplantation and ophthalmology, the field is also one of Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital’s fortes. We will keep trying to cement our lead in the areas.” The hospital’s cardiovascular center, most notably, is the only such center in Korea that treats the entire human body, he noted. “The mechanism in the treatment of all vascular diseases is basically the same, but the hard part is to encourage cooperation from all related departments in the hospital,” Seung said. However, when he served as the head of the hospital’s cardiovascular center, he successfully brought together specialists from all related departments, including those for the brain and cardio. “This is probably the biggest achievement I made during my time as the center’s leader,” he said. “Since then, we have seen a profound effect of integration and cooperation at the center.” One Hospital System is just a bigger version of such integration, which has already proved very positive and powerful, he said.