From a Stanford Medicine online article:

“A simple example would be copper and fiber wires. When you’re putting wires in a new facility, it’s easier to put in many more than you need that moment because putting them in 5 years from now or 10 years from now is quite hard. Something like 85 percent of our copper wires and fiber optic cables are dark right now because we know we’re going to need them in the future.”

When you consider the fast pace of technological advances today, you wonder how do you go about building a new hospital and keep the technology relevant for 10, 20 or even 50 years?  I put that question to Stanford Health Care’s technology wiz Gary Fritz. He told me:

“We try to do something we call future-proof the hospital. We tried to make design decisions and technology decisions that allow us to move to the current or the next generation technology as easily as possible.”