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Improving health technology usage in the UK and South Korea
Dr Rodolfo Catena and Dr Rama Kanungo Prasad (UCL Global Business School for Health) used UCL–KU Strategic Partner Funds to explore how technology can improve communication and healthcare delivery.
18 February 2026
Communication failures are a leading cause of medical mistakes, contributing to the 237 million medication errors that occur annually in England alone. Improving communication and collaboration in hospitals is crucial, given the direct impact this has on patient safety. The prevalence of technology, and its continuous innovation, brings opportunities to improve communication and reduce errors in medical settings. However, with hospitals across the world using technology in different ways – and to varying levels of success – more research is needed to understand optimal implementation strategies.
With a specialism in value-based healthcare, Dr Rodolfo Catena wanted to learn more about the implementation of technology in different medical settings and contexts. As both the UK and South Korea are places with high technological saturation, he and Dr Rama Kanungo Prasad applied for the first ever UCL–KU Strategic Partner Funds to collaborate with Korea University (KU) to explore this subject further. They were successfully awarded the funding, enabling them to collaborate with Dr Hyunmi Park and Professor Young-Mee Lee from KU.
Technology to support global health
“The sheer number of medical errors caused by communication and collaboration failures means we need solutions,” Rodolfo said. “We need high functioning teams to reduce these errors, and to enhance communication and coordination. It’s also important to create a learning system. In the NHS, we often see a blame culture. People blaming each other when something goes wrong isn’t conducive to learning or patient safety. In order to learn, we need more collaboration, and we need to work together to understand the root causes of problems and failures.”
This project enabled Rodolfo and his collaborators to gain access to a number of case studies of different hospitals, and look at how technology has been implemented in each of them. The collaborators were able to tour Korea University Anam Hospital as part of this project, to gain insights into the smart ward system operating there. The smart ward system integrates real-time patient monitoring, electronic alerts and nurse call automation – and it provides shared visual access for health practitioners. Bedside terminals also enable direct patient input and communication with staff, supporting a more patient-responsive care model. These innovations are integrated into electronic medical records and contribute to early warning scores and deterioration prediction. There is active work on expanding the digital infrastructure across the hospital network too, with a particular focus on integrating wearables, patient-generated data, and AI-based triage systems.
In the UK, there is substantive work happening in the metaverse, which the collaborators believe could be an important area to support learning among medical practitioners and hospital workers. With improved computing power and software capabilities, such as Unreal Engine, virtual worlds can be created, and the collaborators discussed the potential value of creating virtual hospitals with AI-driven interactions.
Overall, Rodolfo and his collaborators found that hospitals in South Korea integrated technology and information to a high degree of success, and this is something that the UK can learn from. “This experience in South Korea really highlighted the issues in NHS hospitals,” Rodolfo said. “We need to break down the silos within hospitals, to ensure our systems – at least within the same hospital – talk to each other. A key challenge for the future will also be to integrate information from inside and outside the hospital, such as heart rate information from wearable technology.”
Furthering a key pillar of healthcare delivery
“This project has shown how important collaboration is in healthcare,” Rodolfo said. “We’ve created a very strong connection with Korea University and our collaborators, which will help us to push forward this niche but important area of healthcare. In South Korea there is an emphasis on personalised medicine, artificial intelligence in healthcare, and educational reforms through digital simulation and problem-based learning. There are still many avenues of work we could explore together.”
As a result of this project, the collaborators are currently working on a research paper for a top-tier journal. They have run two symposia about their learnings from this project, one of which had opening remarks by Dr Julia Grace Patterson, known for her book Critical: Why the NHS is being betrayed and how we can fight for it. The collaborators are also applying for additional funding to continue their work.
The project highlighted some more creative ways medical staff could be incentivised in their work too. For example, surgical start-ups in South Korea offer staff other incentives when they can’t pay high salaries. Rodolfo believes there could be an opportunity for the NHS to take inspiration from this, to help deal with striking medical staff asking for pay increases. “From our meetings, we found one of the important things for doctors is to have more flexibility with their time,” Rodolfo explained. “They want to be able to do different things, rather than always focusing, for instance, on their surgical workload. So there could be other ways to give incentives to improve the motivation of staff.”
Rodolfo says this project has been valuable in many different ways. “Professionally, I now see the NHS from a different lens, and that has been really enriching,” he said. “We’ve gained new perspectives and insights from talking with international healthcare leaders, and our networks have expanded. In turn, that has amplified our ability to do research and to apply for funding. We weren’t planning to do research with South Korea, but thanks to this funding, it has been made possible. It was a wonderful experience and I'm very happy we did it.”