Scaling Digital Health: John Campbell on Home Hospital Innovation, AI, and Patient Experience
Digital Product
Sep 3, 2025
In this episode of the Radian Podcast, we sit down with John Campbell, CIO, Consultant, and long-time healthcare technology leader.
John shares lessons from scaling one of the largest hospital-at-home programs in the country, building digital partnerships with companies like Best Buy Health, and leading healthcare IT transformations with Epic, AI, and innovation at the core.
Key Takeaways
Mass General Brigham scaled its home hospital program to 70 beds in under two years, creating millions in new hospital capacity without new construction.
Success required agile digital strategy inside a waterfall culture—a hybrid “Agile Waterfall” model.
Partnership with Best Buy Health brought “air traffic control” logistics to home hospital, aligning two very different organizations around shared vision and value.
Epic EMR adoption across acute and post-acute care was a world-first, unlocking system-wide interoperability and resource sharing.
Adoption of home hospital took time—only 20% of patients accepted in year one, 25% in year two—showing the cultural lift required for systemic change.
AI’s three legs of the stool:
Back-office automation (low risk, high payoff)
Clinical assistant (e.g. ambient note-taking pilots with 2,500 physicians)
Decision support (e.g. stroke detection alerts), always with human oversight
Building the digital hospital of the future at Spalding showed how foresight in infrastructure (ubiquitous computing, digital media) can shape human experiences for decades.
John’s leadership philosophy draws from cycling: pacing, resilience, and staying the course through uphill challenges.
Transcript
Maxwell Murray (00:02.361)
Welcome to the podcast, John. It's a real pleasure to have you on the show today.
John Campbell (00:08.436)
It's a pleasure to be here and speak with you and your audience today. Thank you.
Maxwell Murray (00:12.938)
Awesome. And for our listeners, to give you a sense of the deep expertise John brings to our discussion, he has 20 years of experience in healthcare digital leadership. For a significant part of his career, John served as the CIO for post-acute and home-based care for Mass General Brigham. In that capacity, he truly led significant digital transformation efforts, including the implementation of Meditech and later Epic EMRs across these vital divisions.
Most recently—this is an area I'm particularly excited to explore—John led the launch and impressive scaling of MGB's innovative home hospital program. It's quite remarkable how MGB scaled this program to 70 beds in under two years, a venture that undoubtedly required a complex set of digital solutions delivered very rapidly.
And John's experience isn't confined to one setting. He's also held impactful roles in product and software development at well-known organizations like Beth Israel Deaconess and CVS Pharmacies, and also brings six years of perspective as an IT management consultant. So John, with that incredibly well-rounded and impactful career, we're thrilled to get your insights today.
John Campbell (01:28.846)
Thanks Max. Let's go.
Maxwell Murray (03:49.365)
Excellent. To start, let's talk about one of the most significant shifts in healthcare delivery. Mass General Brigham managed to create what amounts to $50 million in new hospital capacity, not by laying new bricks and mortar, but through digital solutions. Could you walk us through how you managed to scale the hospital-at-home model so effectively and the key lessons you learned in the process?
John Campbell (04:15.661)
Sure, thanks, Max. So first, as you mentioned, MGB scaled its program to 70 beds in under two years. This is unprecedented. At 70 beds, MGB has the second largest program in the country. However, it's the highest acuity program in the country. MGB is taking care of very sick patients at home.
“MGB scaled its program to 70 beds in under two years. This is unprecedented. At 70 beds, MGB has the second largest program in the country. However, it's the highest acuity program in the country—MGB is taking care of very sick patients at home.”
John Campbell, CIO / Consultant
At our launch, we started by engaging a team of consultants to help us devise our operating and financial model, including how those models would evolve as we scaled. We developed these models by identifying a number of work groups that we paired with members of our operations team and came up with solutions for how we would scale the model over time.
We also had a digital consultant that attended all these work groups and cataloged all the digital needs that they heard in these discussions in the room. And that was the beginning of creating our digital work plan. We developed all this data that we collected to create a digital strategy, and we scoped the work. We had to collaborate with many teams across MGB to do that.
Ultimately, this formed our digital strategy and also our funding request. We built a business case and went to executive leadership at MGB and got funded to do the digital work—in the millions of dollars. I can’t say exactly how much.
The day after we got funded, we began the process of hiring a couple of contractors to jumpstart the work. Simultaneously, we started hiring the team. At scale, we had 30 FTEs doing work across multiple domains: everything from EMR modifications, integration work, data and analytics, desktop and devices, telecommunications, and project management.
The goal set by the system was very aggressive. The original goal was 200 beds in two years. That’s what we call a BHAG goal, right? Regardless, that was the goal, so we needed to march toward it. That meant working on dozens of projects simultaneously with continuous coordination with operations on how to activate and roll out these different solutions.
In the beginning, it was very chaotic. We brought in project managers and set up a PMO to organize our work. Over time, we also partnered more closely with operations to get organized on their side. Ultimately, we came up with a joint project management process that we called bundles.
So we were literally creating bundles of content. Those bundles included new diagnostic categories of patients, the services we needed to care for them, the education we had to provide clinical staff, and ultimately all the digital supports required to roll them out. We put those bundles on a timeline, continuously developing and rolling out solutions.
To do all this, we had to be incredibly agile. At the same time, we worked within a system that was not agile. Most of the digital teams used a traditional waterfall approach, and the system at large just did not move that quickly. So we were agile, using some agile ceremonies, and trying to influence our peers on other teams to be more agile with us.
We actually developed a project management methodology we called “Agile Waterfall” because we were agile, and we were working with teams doing waterfall, and we had to make it all work together. In the end, it really took an all-hands approach—digital working in partnership with operations and our digital colleagues—to continuously scale this operation.
The partnership really began because MGB and Best Buy had a shared vision—that care at home can span the entire continuum, from wellness through sickness, and ultimately back to health.
John Campbell, CIO / Consultant
Maxwell Murray (09:59.508)
Yeah, yeah. And one of those contributing factors I imagine is partnership. A big part of this story is rooted in collaboration. Talk to us about your partnership with Best Buy Health. It's a fascinating example of bridging two very different worlds.
If you could share the story behind the collaboration and what you've learned about what it truly takes to build trust and success when pairing a large health system with an industry partner.
John Campbell (11:07.649)
Yeah, thanks Max. So I have to admit, when I first stepped into this role, I didn't know Best Buy had a healthcare division. Anytime I mentioned Best Buy Health, people were like, really? Best Buy? The big box store?
So Best Buy established a healthcare division back in 2018 with the goal of being the consumer health tech supplier of choice. They're already known for being a seller and supporter of tech. They've got Geek Squad, so they can come into the home and set up your tech and service your tech. And they also have a fantastic geographic footprint.
Something like 90% of the US population lives within 10 miles of a CVS pharmacy. A similar percentage lives within 25 miles of a Best Buy store. So they have that geographic footprint as a strategic asset.
Initially, they acquired a couple of consumer tech solutions, like Lively (fall detection) and another phone-based solution for the geriatric population. But in 2021, they stepped up their entry into the space by acquiring a UK company called Current Health. Current Health is a remote patient monitoring platform. In the UK, home hospital is the norm. It’s part of the NHS, and Current Health was the national solution.
So in 2021, Best Buy acquired Current Health and became an RPM provider focused on the US home hospital space.
“There has to be shared value. Both sides have to feel like they're getting a good return. Timing matters too—when there isn’t a solution in the marketplace, you need to create one. And culture matters. Sometimes small startups and large health systems aren’t a match.”
John Campbell, CIO / Consultant
One of the things MGB realized early on, because of that audacious goal of 200 patients, was that managing logistics at scale would be near impossible without a software solution. Every patient at home gets between 10 and 20 services each, and many of those are provided by third parties: meals from a vendor, home health aides from agencies, supplies from another provider, mobile radiology, paramedics, plus our own staff.
At 200 patients, that’s 2,000 to 4,000 discrete tasks every day. Without a technology solution, you don’t know something’s off track until it didn’t happen.
So the cornerstone of the partnership with Best Buy Health was to develop a logistics solution to manage all of that. It provided visibility—what I call “air traffic control for home hospital.” It gave us alerts when things were off track and provided a daily schedule for both the patient and the overseeing clinician.
So if you’re the patient, you can know: What time is my nurse coming in the morning? Paramedic in the afternoon? When is my home health aide arriving? Where’s my lunch? Without technology, these things just happen randomly throughout the day.
We had a mind meld over creating the solution. Both sides then had to do diligence: Best Buy had to validate costs, market demand, and ROI. We had to validate whether the solution would meet our needs and be technologically sound.
We assembled a digital oversight team across MGB to review the proposed solution, while simultaneously negotiating the contract. Those contracts had to spell out accountability, timelines, penalties if objectives weren’t met, and even exit terms—because you hope you never need them, but if you do, it shouldn’t be a battle.
Ultimately, we signed and began development. Best Buy did the software build, while we provided expertise, sandbox environments, and acted as the alpha customer. On our side, we hired a small team: one for adoption (org readiness), one for integration with Epic and other apps, and one to manage the relationship.
They had a full team on their side, and together we worked to deliver the product. It took longer than expected, but overall the partnership was strong, and the product is on its way.
Maxwell Murray (19:59.417)
Yeah. So from hearing you, it was about vision alignment, having the right set of tools, building teams on both sides, and structuring things to align with the goals. The most human-centered and insightful point for me was this notion of visibility.
We’re currently in the middle of a continuous glucose monitoring study where timing of alerts is critical. With remote care, patients and clinicians need clarity in real time. It’s interesting that you surfaced that as a central need for remote monitoring.
John Campbell (21:30.816)
Yeah. Absolutely. Max, you touched on shared vision. There also has to be shared value. Both sides need to gain something.
…That reduced duplicate tests, reduced unnecessary ER returns, and let us share resources across sites. Pre-Epic, a nurse couldn’t float between hospitals because the EMR implementations were different. Post-Epic, we could share staff across locations.
John Campbell, CIO / Consultant
I’ve been talking to a lot of founders who find it frustrating working with health systems: sales cycles are long and it’s hard to break in. Our partnership worked because the timing was right, there was no existing solution, and there was value and execution from both sides.
Maxwell Murray (23:36.45)
Good points, good points. So beyond the hospital, the patient journey often involves a complex web of skilled nursing facilities, rehab hospitals, and home care. How do you approach digital transformation in such a complicated federated ecosystem, ensuring both clinicians and patients have consistent and high-quality experiences?
John Campbell (24:05.197)
Sure, Max. It's a great question. There's no question that the healthcare system is incredibly complex. Peter Drucker, who's a management guru, once said that the hospital is the most complicated organization man has ever created. And I think he's right.
“I refer to it as a Rubik's Cube that's never done. You just keep twisting, hoping you get to the answer, but you never fully get there.”
Anyway, my experience at MGB was in what's called the post-acute division. A lot of people don't really understand the post-acute side of healthcare. Most understand acute: a doctor’s office, urgent care, the ER, or inpatient surgery. Post-acute includes rehabilitation (both hospitals and outpatient), skilled nursing facilities, long-term acute care hospitals, home care, hospice, and now home hospital. That was the portfolio I managed at Mass General Brigham.
When I first joined, many of those entities were still on paper. The first wave of transformation was getting them digitized. They had back-office systems—billing, rev cycle, claims—but not clinical systems. Our hospitals used Meditech, skilled nursing and home care used others. Each entity had a different solution. Even the Meditech hospitals had separate instances that didn’t talk to each other.
So we got them digitized within each entity, but they still couldn’t exchange data across entities. Good progress, but not ideal.
The second wave came with Epic. Epic created an opportunity for a single EMR, not just across post-acute, but across all of Mass General Brigham. Now, no matter where the patient went—PCP, urgent care, ER, or post-acute—the record was the same and complete.
In the old state, a patient discharged from Mass General to Spalding would arrive with a stack of hundreds of printed pages. Even though both had EMRs, there was no data transfer. With Epic, every clinician everywhere had the same view of the patient’s data.
That reduced duplicate tests, reduced unnecessary ER returns, and let us share resources across sites. Pre-Epic, a nurse couldn’t float between hospitals because the EMR implementations were different. Post-Epic, we could share staff across locations.
I also want to note: Mass General Brigham was the first system in the world to run Epic across both acute and post-acute. Before us, Epic hadn’t tailored their EMR for post-acute settings. We thought it was important, so when we signed the contract, we got Epic to agree to co-develop those capabilities. Rehab, LTAC, skilled nursing—those were all built out in partnership.
“AI will not replace physicians. But physicians who use AI will replace physicians who don’t.”
John Campbell, CIO / Consultant
Maxwell Murray (30:09.693)
The plug is welcomed because interoperability is huge. Personally, I have a browser tab full of different patient portals. I think of myself as digitally native, and even I find it hard to navigate. For older or less tech-savvy users, it’s even harder. It’s encouraging to hear your early work helped drive things in the right direction.
John Campbell (31:22.221)
Yeah. And Max, it’s 2025 and the rate of tech change is astonishing. We take for granted how digitized things are now. But it was only 2010, under the Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, that $20 billion was earmarked for EMR adoption. Before 2010, only about 20% of hospitals and doctors’ offices had an EMR. Now it’s in the high 90s.
So yes, some of these stories sound old-fashioned, but the progress in just 15 years has been incredible.
Maxwell Murray (32:13.948)
Yeah, and you know, we're talking about these solutions and I know everyone's been watching the market and concerned about where government spending and perspective on healthcare will go. I'm hearing a sense of lowered costs for healthcare and less dependence on government-backed funding. Innovation often brings one important factor: reduction of costs while increasing value. What's your perspective on how things are shaping up?
John Campbell (33:12.993)
Yeah, I absolutely agree with you, Max. The next generation of digital healthcare is really going to be focused around AI and the opportunities it brings—along with moving care into lower-cost settings. Having the majority of the health system on an EMR is now table stakes. Without it, you can’t leverage AI or shift care to the home.
Now that we’ve digitized almost everything, we have the data to drive costs down. The next era of digital health will be exciting.
Maxwell Murray (35:07.121)
Yeah, agreed. One more angle—if costs come down, what does that mean for patient value?
John Campbell (35:50.798)
We’re in unprecedented times. Hospitals and health systems are under enormous strain—capacity issues everywhere. Patient experience is suffering despite the focus. But with AI and shifting care, we have a chance to refactor delivery.
Something like 70% of ER care could be delivered elsewhere. If we create systems for that, we can relieve capacity and improve experience. Companies like Dispatch Health are already doing ER-at-home. Over time, patients will have better experiences than they’re getting in traditional ER or inpatient settings.
Maxwell Murray (59:16.261)
Every leader is being asked about their AI strategy. From your perspective, what is the most realistic and responsible way to integrate generative AI and automation into home-based care right now?
“As anyone walks through Spalding, they see digital murals of recovery—stories of hope. It’s not just technology; it’s healing through design.”
John Campbell, CIO / Consultant
I see three main legs of the stool:
Back-end systems — administrative tasks, claims, revenue cycle. Low risk, high payoff.
AI as a clinical assistant — things like ambient note-taking. At MGB, after two years of piloting, 2,500 physicians actively use it. That’s the largest implementation in the country. Adoption takes time, but it’s happening.
AI for decision support — interpreting radiology, flagging strokes faster. It should never replace clinicians, but it can accelerate detection and outcomes.
Healthcare will likely adopt in that order: back-office → assistant → support. Clinicians are cautious, but over time routine tasks will be automated, freeing them for higher-order care.
There’s already exciting work in stroke detection. Time is critical in stroke care. AI can flag cases faster than radiologists alone, prompting quicker intervention. That can change patient outcomes dramatically.
Again, AI isn’t coming for clinicians’ jobs. We don’t have enough physicians and nurses as it is. AI is a tool to help them spend more time on human care.
Maxwell Murray (01:08:17.833)
Yeah, I agree with your three legs and the progression. At first I was frightened when I saw ChatGPT draft pages of work. But then you realize: human creativity and insight are far from being replaced. The goal is removing routine, mundane tasks so doctors can spend more time making eye contact with patients and forming trust.
John Campbell (01:09:13.133)
Absolutely.
Maxwell Murray (01:09:15.775)
All right, thank you, appreciate it. I want to touch on some more areas where we've seen innovation in your work. For example, the digital hospital of the future at Spalding—how you explored concepts like context-aware spaces years ago. What core principles from that vision still hold true? And what does it really mean to build a future-ready healthcare environment?
John Campbell (01:10:02.574)
Back in the early 2010s, I had the opportunity to design, build, and bring to life a new hospital. As a CIO, that was an amazing experience. Lots of CIOs retrofit or add on to existing buildings, but rarely do you start from scratch.
We wanted technology to play a significant role. But planning and construction cycles are long—six years in our case. Six years is a long time in technology. So we did visioning sessions with clinical leadership, cataloged must-haves, nice-to-haves, and future-thinking projects.
An example: when we began, Cat5 cabling was standard. Halfway through, Cat6 emerged. We analyzed costs and decided to go Cat6—it added $1M upfront but saved multiples later.
We also ran an innovation project we called the “smart hospital,” based on RTLS (real-time location sensors). The idea was context-aware spaces—optimizing staff, equipment, and patient tracking. Ultimately, RTLS didn’t converge as a technology, so it wasn’t widely adopted.
But digital signage did emerge. We built in infrastructure for it even before it was widespread, and by opening day costs had dropped. Spalding became the first hospital in the world with digital media designed in from the ground up.
From day one, patients were greeted by large displays of rehab success stories—stroke survivors rowing, paraplegics skiing. It turned the building into a space of hope. When we unveiled it, there wasn’t a dry eye among the board and leadership.
Twelve years later, those displays still look new and continue to inspire.