Hospitals of the future: 40% of non-clinical tasks to robots and AI cuts waiting lists

Italia is facing a new season of major investment in hospital construction, with more than 40 new hospitals being designed or built and more than EUR 10 billion in financial mobilisation. This historic moment brings with it challenging objectives that can only be tackled by combining technological research and social responsibility. Sustainability, digitisation, automation and quality of space in healthcare must be translated into quantitative indicators and evaluation tools that can guide planning, design and management. This is demonstrated by the data of the 2025 research conducted by the Joint Research Partnership (JRP) Healthcare Infrastructures platform and presented during the 4th Annual Meeting held at the Politecnico di Milano on 24 February, with over 200 participants and representatives from the World Health Organisation, the Ministry of Health, and several Italian regions.

The platform, set up in 2022 by the ABC department of the Politecnico di Milano together with the Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, has defined in its first three years of activity a Next Generation Hospital meta-design model. During these years, a meta-design framework has been generated, capable of integrating the different dimensions of the infrastructure into a systemic vision of the hospital of the future.

In 2025, a new phase of operational maturity began in the direction of parameter measurement, with the development of platforms and tools, and the collection of data on the state of the art of Italian hospital infrastructure.

The data collected show concrete impacts. Automation and artificial intelligence can contribute significantly to the organisational efficiency of hospitals. According to, JRP Report HI 2025 40% of non-clinical activities could be performed by robots. The application of AI to flow and bed management is associated with reductions in average hospital stays and waiting times of up to 15%. The transformation of construction models can lead to an acceleration of construction times, as 20 per cent of the industry will be based on pre-fabricated and modular systems by 2030.

On the environmental front, however, a significant gap emerges in our hospitals: only a residual proportion of Italian hospitals now reach international standards for energy consumption, monitoring and energy supply from renewable sources, highlighting the need for shared and verifiable environmental indices.