Reimagining Care with AI

Healing Through Technology

At the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), renowned globally for its expertise in musculoskeletal care, the fusion of tradition and innovation is reshaping patient experiences. Leading this transformation is Bashir Agboola, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President, who emphasizes the pivotal role of technology in enhancing healthcare delivery. "You can buy new technology, but you can’t buy teamwork," Agboola notes, highlighting the importance of collaboration in driving technological advancements.

Agboola's journey to the forefront of healthcare technology in the United States underscores his commitment to leveraging digital tools for improved patient outcomes. With a background in computer science and extensive experience in healthcare IT, he brings a unique perspective to the challenges and opportunities in modern healthcare.

Addressing Legacy Challenges

Like many longstanding healthcare institutions, HSS’s greatest strength, its 160-year history, also posed one of its toughest challenges. Decades of incremental tech adoption had created fragmented data systems and siloed workflows, preventing clinicians from getting a unified view of the patient experience. According to Agboola, “We needed to focus on digital workplace transformation…’[For perspective], in all of 2019, we had less than 1500 telehealth sessions.”

This fragmentation became even more problematic as HSS expanded beyond its flagship hospital. “For the first 150 years of HSS, we did surgery at the hospital,” he explains. “In the last five years, we've opened a number of ambulatory surgical care centers.” These facilities promised convenience and better access but also required interoperability across new and legacy platforms.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which acted as both a magnifier and a catalyst. “We went from an organization that had less than 1% of our workforce working remotely to over a third of the organization working from home by March 2020,” Agboola recalls. Telehealth surged, digital communication tools exploded in importance, and IT became mission-critical overnight. For HSS, it was a call to not just modernize but to radically reimagine how to deliver care securely, virtually, and intelligently.

Digital Tools for Patient Care

One of the highlights of HSS’s transformation has been the introduction of in-house 3D printing for surgical implants. Working with a European partner, HSS became the first U.S. hospital to host an FDA-regulated implant manufacturing site within its walls. This enables orthopedic surgeons to customize joint replacements with unprecedented precision.

“For things like that, you might think, ‘3D printing, is that digital?’ Of course…it's all along the line of digital transformation. The modern total knee replacement was developed at HSS close to 50 years ago. So, being able to do 3D printing of implants for those acute situations is just in line with that tradition of groundbreaking innovation.” Agboola says. This breakthrough improves surgical outcomes and accelerates recovery times, both of which are key to HSS’s value proposition in the orthopedic space.

AI is also playing an increasingly prominent role in the patient journey. HSS is deploying AI models that assist in diagnosing conditions by analyzing imaging scans. The potential to improve access to care is significant, especially if you can use AI to provide an initial diagnosis where a specialist isn’t available.

“If we get it right, it's going to revolutionize care delivery from many dimensions. With AI-enabled treatment programs, you can take care of people that are in long distances from where the care providers are, whether it's using technologies with computer vision to analyze skin conditions to do radiographical analysis of images, MRIs, or CT scans,” says Bashir.

Another area where AI is quietly transforming operations is in logistics and resource planning. Predictive analytics are used to anticipate patient volumes, manage surgical suite availability, and identify potential readmissions based on post-op recovery data.

Delivering High-Quality Healthcare Experiences

Agboola often draws parallels between patients' expectations in healthcare and those formed in the consumer world. This shift has challenged providers like HSS to digitize workflows and completely reimagine the patient experience from the front door to discharge.

“It's crucial to remove friction for your organization in the use of technology. One of my areas of focus in the next several months is the digital employee experience and making sure that we remove friction as much as possible with our employees in meeting consumer expectations.”

HSS is leveraging data science to make care more anticipatory and meet these expectations. By analyzing historical health records, the organization is beginning to predict which patients may be at higher risk for specific outcomes, allowing physicians to intervene earlier.

HSS is also modernizing how it collects and responds to patient feedback. Using natural language processing (NLP), they analyze patient comments in real-time to identify areas of concern or satisfaction. This helps department leaders quickly adapt protocols, resolve issues, and fine-tune operations with surgical precision, much like the care they deliver.

Tackling Ethics, Cyber Risks, and Patient Confidentiality

With great technological capability, however, comes the critical responsibility to safeguard data and uphold ethical standards. Healthcare is a common target for cybercrime, and when you add AI to the mix, the stakes get even higher. HSS has responded by implementing multi-layered cybersecurity protocols and developing governance frameworks to monitor algorithmic bias, data quality, and model drift.

Agboola also points out the emerging risks of over-dependence on black-box AI models in clinical decision-making. Transparency and explainability are key priorities, especially when lives are on the line. To address this, HSS is working closely with vendors and internal teams to ensure all algorithms used in patient care are auditable, fair, and replicable.

Blockchain, too, is being explored as a technology to safeguard trust. Agboola mentions the potential use of decentralized ledgers to authenticate pharmaceutical supply chains. “People have also talked about tackling the problems of counterfeit therapeutics, which is a big problem. The decentralized nature of the blockchain allows us to track the provenance of a drug.” This not only boosts patient safety but also reduces the risk of counterfeit medications entering the healthcare system.

Envisioning Tomorrow's Hospital, Today

Looking forward, Bashir envisions a healthcare landscape that is less centered on physical hospitals and more distributed across home, mobile, and digital interfaces. “The future of healthcare has us consuming care virtually more and in ambulatory settings,” he notes. This doesn’t mean hospitals will disappear, but rather that they’ll evolve into nodes in a much larger, more innovative care ecosystem.

To prepare for this, HSS is investing in scalable, cloud-based infrastructure that can adapt to patient needs no matter where they are. They’re piloting wearables for post-op monitoring, virtual reality tools for physical therapy, and chatbot assistants to handle routine scheduling and intake questions.

But even as he looks toward the bleeding edge of technology, Agboola remains grounded in HSS’s patient-first ethos.

HSS’s transformation under Bashir is a compelling case study of how healthcare organizations can embrace next-generation technologies without losing sight of their core mission. By integrating AI, 3D printing, and cloud infrastructure with a deep respect for ethics, privacy, and patient trust, Agboola and his team are charting a course for the hospital of the future, one that heals with intelligence.