Rehabilitation Hospitals Need a Strong IT Base to Support Patient Recovery

To power operations, Spaulding Rehabilitation relies on Mass General Brigham’s strong IT foundation, which includes two on-premises data centers and Cisco networking that can support a fleet of mobile devices for bedside care, emerging solutions that embrace data analytics and artificial intelligence, and assistive or rehabilitative technologies such as robotics or virtual reality headsets.  

“The layers that go into the tech stack are essentially the same as any hospital. You have to have those same foundational capabilities — the backbone to ensure resiliency and connectivity,” says Mutaz Shegewi, senior research director at IDC Health Insights.

Mass General Brigham’s Systemwide Approach

The MGB Digital Team — Mass General Brigham’s central IT department — manages the core tech for the whole health system and provides 24/7 tech support, risk management and centralized AI governance. It also manages enterprise applications, such as a highly customized on-premises version of Epic’s electronic health records system with rehab modules that Spaulding Rehabilitation uses for care and discharge planning.

That allows Backman and his IT team at Spaulding Rehabilitation to focus on local, daily IT management and support for its two IRFs, a long-term acute care hospital, a skilled nursing facility and 30 outpatient therapy centers.

While the MGB Digital Team makes hardware purchasing decisions, Backman and his team handle support for Spaulding Rehabilitation’s 3,300 Dell laptops and desktops, 800 Apple iPhones and 450 iPad devices. Clinicians use workstations on wheels in patient rooms, where they access the EHR and other applications through Citrix virtual desktops.

“It allows me to have these enterprise capabilities that I might not have if I wasn’t tapped into such a big engine,” Backman says. “My role is to bridge the gap of those enterprise digital components and capabilities and bring it to our local environment. It gives our patients a continuous experience across all of our levels of care.”

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Spaulding Rehabilitation Has a Secure and Reliable Foundation

Spaulding Rehabilitation can’t afford downtime, so the MGB Digital Team has built in redundancy and invested in monitoring tools to ensure patients receive uninterrupted care, he says. An active-passive configuration of the healthcare organization’s data centers ensures that if one suffers an outage, the other keeps operations running.

Mass General Brigham recently invested in Dynatrace’s observability tool for real-time monitoring, allowing the organization to stay ahead of performance issues, Backman adds.

“We need speed, reliability and uptime. When systems move slowly, it can disrupt day-to-day care. We are constantly monitoring, and all the redundancy and the security measures we have in place enable that,” Backman says.

Spaulding Rehabilitation is increasing the number of wireless access points and expanding wireless coverage — even in parking garages and outdoor therapy areas — to ensure its increasingly mobile workforce has internet access throughout. Therapists and clinicians use laptops, tablets and smartphones in gyms, ambulatory clinic rooms and other rehab spaces for real-time documentation with patients, Backman says.

“Our breadth and coverage of our network needs to reach every corner, regardless of where the clinician is interacting with the patient,” he says. “It matters for clinician satisfaction, speed, reliability and uptime, and the infrastructure gives them that.”

The growing use of AI helps staff improve productivity. About 500 clinicians and therapists have started using Microsoft Dragon Copilot for AI-powered transcription of patient sessions to reduce their administrative burden. “They’re now editing and proofreading and no longer have to do all that documentation,” he says.

And more assistive technology means that patients receive better communication and cognitive support, as well as mobility and physical rehab capabilities. A robotic exoskeleton, for instance, can help patients stand up and walk hands-free while doing physical therapy, Backman says.

Innovation isn’t a single destination for Spaulding Rehabilitation. The journey continues with developing homegrown data repository and using data lake applications, including Snowflake, for data analytics. Still in the works is a predictive model to help its hospitals identify patients who may need rehab or other post-acute services. Mass General Brigham also plans to add high-performance computing to support research work, Backman says.

“One of our focus points in research is around data and analytics. It’s taking vast amounts of data, making it accessible and query-able to those performing studies,” he says.

TIRR Memorial Hermann Supports Strong Connections

Another highly ranked IRF, Memorial Hermann Health System’s TIRR Memorial Hermann also incorporates advanced data analytics to assess and improve the quality and effectiveness of care. The organization operates its flagship inpatient rehabilitation hospital within the Texas Medical Center, along with four other inpatient facilities and eight outpatient locations across the greater Houston area.

“Meaningful integration of technology across the entire rehabilitation and recovery journey is absolutely integral,” says Dr. Farhaan Vahidy, chief scientific officer at TIRR Memorial Hermann and associate vice president for clinical innovation and research for the broader health system.

TIRR Memorial Hermann relies primarily on cloud-based infrastructure. With a fast, wireless network, clinicians – equipped with laptops and other mobile devices – can securely access the Epic EHR system, rehabilitation data and other clinical applications across inpatient units, therapy environments and specialized rehabilitation settings, Vahidy says.

“The technology infrastructure is designed to make clinical care, data and innovation function as a single, connected ecosystem,” he says.

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Data and Analytics a Key Part of Care Delivery

In 2024, Vahidy established a five-person multidisciplinary team, called the Center for Health Outcomes and Informatics Research in Rehabilitation (CHOIRR), that handles data analytics, clinical research and the implementation of new rehab technologies. Consisting of data engineers, data scientists and software developers, the team relies on a mix of high-end desktop computers and Memorial Hermann’s broader cloud-based data environment, including Snowflake technology.

Data analytics enable TIRR Memorial Hermann to operate as a “learning health system,” where clinicians ask questions that come up during routine clinical care, and the CHOIRR team studies those questions by analyzing current and historical rehabilitation data. They then compare their findings against external research and use the results to improve care, Vahidy says. Research and innovation are integrated with clinical care, not separated.

“The most important clinical questions start at the bedside,” he says. “Our job is to turn those questions into trusted data, generate answers quickly and bring those answers back to the bedside. Then we learn: Does it work? Is it safe? And can we scale it? If not, we adapt. That continuous cycle of questioning, learning and improving is what makes a learning health system work.”

CHOIRR’s work has recently been published in two peer-reviewed publications. In a stroke study, the team found that the proportion of patients achieving a clinically meaningful 20-point improvement during inpatient rehabilitation rose from 20% two decades ago to more than 50% today.

In another study, CHOIRR evaluated TIRR Memorial Hermann’s canine-assisted therapy program and found a significant functional benefit among patients with brain injuries.

The health system has deployed a brain-computer interface device, paired with an augmented reality headset, that allows the IRF to check task-related brain activity in patients with severe brain injuries who can’t communicate reliably through speech or movement. The networking infrastructure is key for the technology to work properly.

“This brain-computer interface device is transmitting gigabytes and petabytes of data continuously across the network, and it’s not choking the clinical network,” Vahidy says.

Overall, CHOIRR is improving rehab services through its collaborative work with clinicians.

“What makes this model different is that research is not happening on the sidelines,” Vahidy says. “CHOIRR is embedded in the clinical enterprise, working with clinicians, supporting quality and safety, evaluating new technologies and using data to improve care.”