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At the Hospital C-Suite Summit 2026, one of the most quietly radical ideas challenged an assumption as old as medicine itself: that care must happen inside a hospital. Across sessions on AI, workforce, and operations, leaders described a future where the hospital reaches into the home – through virtual wards, remote monitoring, and AI that watches over patients between visits. The building isn’t disappearing. But it is no longer the only place care takes place.
For centuries, “going to hospital” has meant exactly that – travelling to a building, occupying a bed, being cared for on site. At HC-S 2026, several leaders described a shift that upends this model. The question they posed was disarmingly simple: what if the right care, in the right place, often means no hospital visit at all?
Care Without an Address
The phrase itself came from Galia Barkai, Director of Sheba BEYOND at Sheba Medical Center, whose presentation in the opening session challenged healthcare’s oldest spatial assumption.
Through virtual care models – remote cardiac rehabilitation, high-risk pregnancy monitoring, wearable technologies, tele-ultrasound, and AI-powered decision support – Sheba is extending the hospital beyond its walls. The goal, she stressed, is not to replace hospitals but to ensure patients receive the right care in the right place, often without needing to travel at all. Collaboration with other hospitals means there is always a fallback to a local facility. “Care without an address” is less a product than a philosophy: the hospital as a service that follows the patient, rather than a place the patient must reach.
Intensive Care, Delivered at Home
In the workforce and operational excellence sessions, Avi Tsur, of Sheba Medical Center, showed how far this can go, even for the highest-risk patients.
His reimagined antepartum unit combines home monitoring with periodic hospital visits, delivering intensive care for high-risk pregnancies largely outside the ward. Conversational AI replaces routine midwife calls, AI confirms normal fetal heart rates and flags abnormalities, plain-language AI notes help expectant mothers understand their own care. Underpinning it all are maternal and fetal “digital twins” that predict deterioration days in advance – the safety net that makes remote care of sick patients possible. The outcomes were better despite the patients being sicker, and, as Avi noted, families stayed together through illness rather than being separated by admission.
The Enablers and the Barriers
Look across the Summit and the pattern recurs: hospital-at-home programs featured in the operational excellence session as a way to reduce admissions and length of stay, and remote-care ambitions surfaced wherever workforce limits were discussed. But the speakers were clear-eyed about what makes it work, and what makes it fail.
Three enablers came up repeatedly. Predictive tools, especially digital twins, are essential to catch deterioration before it becomes a crisis at home. Upstream coordination with primary care and municipal services is non-negotiable, so that hospital-at-home doesn’t simply shift the burden onto community providers. And cultural change among clinicians, trusting that a patient monitored at home is genuinely safe, is often the hardest part.
The barriers are just as real: digital literacy gaps that risk leaving some patients behind, the need for regulatory endorsement and workable financial models, and the discipline to design remote pathways around the patient rather than the institution.
Why It Matters Now
The address-less hospital is not a futuristic indulgence; it is a response to the pressures running through every session at HC-S 2026. With workforces shrinking and demand rising, extending care into the home is a way to reach more patients with the same, or fewer, staff. It aligns with the “abundance” logic that surfaced across the program – using technology to do what was previously impossible. And it meets patients where they increasingly want to be met: at home, in their own lives, with the hospital watching over them from a distance.
The Takeaway
The hospital of the future will still have an address. But it will no longer be defined by it. The institutions leading this shift are building the digital twins, remote-monitoring platforms, and community partnerships that let them deliver real care – even intensive care – wherever the patient happens to be.
The building isn’t going anywhere. But increasingly, the care is.
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