About 50 Years in the Making...

Today we are launching the new HCI.

It is not perfect. Neither are we. But it represents our best attempt to bring the HCI user experience into this decade.

New website. New brand. New product names. New interfaces. New device management platform. New virtual care technology. New AI.

Apparently, you are not allowed to launch a healthcare technology company in 2026 without mentioning AI within the first thirty seconds.

We have been working toward this for years. In some ways, we have been working toward it for more than fifty years.

The original name was probably the best one

The original name of the company was Hospital Communications Inc.

Honestly, that was probably the best name we ever had.

It was simple. It was accurate. It told people exactly what we did.

Naturally, we changed it.

The company was sold and became Health Care Information Corporation, which explains why our website became hcic.com. Later, the legal name became Healthcare Information LLC. We dropped the C. Then, at some point, marketing added TV.

That made sense at the time because televisions were at the center of what we did.

Today, televisions are still important, but they are only one part of the patient room.

We now build digital whiteboards, digital door signs, patient television interfaces, mobile applications, virtual nursing, eSitting, device management, clinical integrations, and unit operations software.

I have looked into buying hci.com, hci.ai, and hci.one.

Great domains.

They are also either priced like oceanfront property or owned by someone who appears to have entered the witness protection program.

So, we are sticking with HCI.

Maybe that is appropriate because the original idea was right all along.

We are in the business of hospital communications.

Fifty years of experience and almost twenty five years of mistakes

The Pratt family bought HCI after the company had already been operating for thirty years.

We have since added almost twenty five years of our own.

That gives us more than fifty years of experience in hospital communications, which sounds impressive until you realize how many opportunities that provides to make mistakes.

We have taken full advantage of those opportunities.

We have not always been the best at sales.

We have definitely not always been the best at marketing.

There were years when our marketing strategy could best be described as hoping someone called us.

We have not always executed as well as we should have. We built products that were difficult to explain. We used different names for related technology. We occasionally made it harder to buy from us than it should have been.

Meanwhile, we watched companies with mediocre products and superior marketing get acquired for enormous amounts of money.

I would look at some of these deals and think, “That product barely works.”

Then I would look at their website and think, “That is a very nice website.”

It was humbling.

The lesson was obvious. Building the better product is not enough if nobody understands what it does, why it matters, or how to buy it.

So, we are flipping the script.

We are taking the product quality, flexibility, integrations, and practical experience that have always made HCI different, and we are finally presenting them as clearly as they deserve.

We are going to be better at the entire business, not only the software.

Bringing HCI into this decade

The new website and interface represent a major change for HCI.

Again, they are not perfect.

I am sure there are things we will change. I am sure someone will find a page that looks strange on a particular tablet from 2017.

That is part of the process.

The important thing is that the new HCI finally looks and feels like the company we are trying to become.

The interface is cleaner.

The products share a common design language.

The names make more sense.

The website explains what we do without requiring the reader to understand twenty years of HCI company history first.

We have spent decades building useful technology. It was time for the experience surrounding that technology to catch up.

This is our best attempt to bring HCI into this decade.

Hopefully, we finish before the decade ends.

We have been leading longer than most people realize

I know this can sound like bragging.

Sometimes I sound like I am bragging because parts of my life have been outrageous. I have been incredibly fortunate.

It has also been humbling, to say the least.

HCI has introduced ideas that are now becoming common across the industry. We have been connecting patient room displays to clinical systems for decades. We built hardware independent software before hardware independence became a standard line in everyone’s presentation. We built through channel partners. We created flexible partner strategies. We turned whiteboards, televisions, door signs, tablets, cameras, and unit boards into connected clinical endpoints.

Today, you can see our influence throughout the market.

Sometimes you have to do a double take.

You will see competitor product interfaces that look very familiar. You will see channel strategies that feel familiar. You will see partner strategies that sound like conversations we were having years ago.

There are at least a couple of companies where you do not have to look especially hard.

That used to bother me more than it does today.

I put our ideas out there because we are already moving on to the next thing. If somebody is copying what we showed last year, we should be building what they will notice next year.

Besides, there are only so many ways to place a patient’s name, room number, care team, and daily goal on a screen.

At some point, we all discover rectangles.

The difference is what happens underneath the interface.

Can it work with the hospital’s existing hardware?

Can it connect with Epic, Oracle Health, Meditech, nurse call, smart beds, RTLS, dietary systems, and identity platforms?

Can the hospital manage the devices?

Can the platform support the next workflow without replacing the last one?

Can the company actually deliver it?

That is where fifty years of experience becomes useful.

One platform for the patient room

The new HCI is organized around HCI ONE.

HCI ONE brings seven products together:

HCI ONE Patient

HCI ONE Whiteboard

HCI ONE Door Sign

HCI ONE Mobile

HCI ONE Guardian

HCI ONE Engine

HCI ONE Command

Each product has a clear job.

Patient provides entertainment, education, hospital information, and patient engagement through the television.

Whiteboard makes care information understandable inside the room.

Door Sign presents appropriate information outside the room.

Mobile extends selected experiences to personal devices.

Guardian supports eSitting and virtual nursing.

Engine manages the connected device estate and provides the integration foundation.

Command gives care and operational teams a live view across the unit or department.

Together, they form the operating system for the patient room.

That does not mean a hospital has to purchase everything at once. In fact, we would rather begin with one real problem.

Manage the television fleet.

Replace a manual whiteboard.

Expand an eSitting program.

Connect a virtual nurse through the whiteboard.

Give the unit a better operational view.

Start with the problem that matters today. Build it correctly. Measure it. Then keep the path open for whatever comes next.

That is what a platform should do.

My dad retired. Sort of.

HCI has always been a family business.

My dad recently retired.

Well, kind of.

He plays more golf now, which is generally how retirement is measured in our family.

But occasionally one of his golfing buddies, who used to be a doctor, needs a demonstration. Or some new healthcare application company finds him and wants to discuss an idea.

Suddenly, retirement is temporarily suspended, and he is back explaining the future of healthcare to everyone.

Then he finishes the demonstration and presumably returns to the golf course.

That curiosity has always been part of HCI.

We keep asking what the patient room could do better. We keep listening to nurses, patients, hospital technology teams, and partners.

Many of the best ideas in HCI ONE came from customers who asked us why something had to be so difficult.

Sometimes we had a good answer.

More often, we decided to fix it.

We are trying harder

I have been saying for the better part of a decade that HCI is on the cusp of greatness.

At this point, people are reasonably entitled to ask how large this cusp is.

But I believe it more today than I ever have.

The products are ready.

The platform is clear.

The interface finally feels like one system.

The website tells the story.

The strategy makes sense.

Most importantly, we have learned enough from our mistakes to understand what the next stage requires.

We are going to try harder.

We are going to communicate better.

We are going to make HCI easier to understand, easier to buy, easier to deploy, and easier to support.

We are going to keep doing honest work with honest people.

That last part matters to me more now than it did twenty years ago.

There are plenty of shortcuts in this business. There are plenty of people who will promise something, collect the purchase order, and let someone else discover what the promise actually required.

That is not how we want to work.

We will not be perfect. History suggests that would be an ambitious promise.

But we will be honest about what we know, what we are building, and what it takes to make the technology work inside a real hospital.

And yes, we have AI too

Do not worry. We did not forget AI.

Our new platform has AI.

Our website probably has AI.

This blog has almost certainly has AI.

The difference is that we are not interested in adding AI to a product so we can place a glowing purple icon on the screen and call it transformation.

We are applying it to work that can actually help nurses.

Ambient transcription.

Structured documentation.

Translation.

Patient conversation summaries.

Task capture.

Communication between bedside and virtual teams.

Work that consumes time today and can be made easier tomorrow.

The test is not whether the technology can generate an impressive demonstration.

The test is whether a nurse finishes the shift with less unnecessary work.

That is a much higher standard.

It is also the only one that matters.

More on that soon.

For today, welcome to the new HCI.

It is not perfect.

Neither are we.

But it is honest, it is ambitious, and it is the clearest expression yet of where we believe hospital communications is going.

The screens have changed.

The name has changed several times.

The website finally changed.

The mission has not.

We are still in the business of hospital communications.

And we are just getting started.