Efforts on Smart Hospitals: A Systematic Review

Introduction: Nowadays, digital technologies and systems have affected various aspects ofour daily lives. Health domain is one of the areas which has witnesses significant developmentthrough using digital tools. As an example, smart tools do play an important role in diagnosisand treatment of various diseases. Therefore, development of such technologies has resulted increation of a new concept called “smart hospital”. “Digital hospital” was firstly introduced withthe aim of transferring paper-based systems and patient files to electronic health records (EHR).Afterwards, the triple concept of care, health and cost was developed in ۲۰۰۷, emphasizing onthe improvement of care and health while decreasing related costs in every healthcare organization.With the approval of The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health(HITECH) Act in ۲۰۰۹, this use increased exponentially. After a while, the word “digital” wasslowly replaced with “smart” and the initial attempts for developing smart hospitals were startedand many research studies and operational projects were conducted in this field. Therefore, due tothe importance of using smart hospital and considering it as that comprehensive concept, here weaim to provide a review regarding researches conducted on this concept.Materials & Methods: ۸۰۸ studies were identified using keywords including “smart hospital”,“digital hospital” and “intelligent hospital” through searching in the PubMed, Science Direct,Embase, Scopus and IEEE databases Overall, after applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria(۷۰۵ based on abstract and titles and ۳۵ after reading full texts) and removing duplicates (۴۳),۲۵studies were included in this review.Results: Geographically, most of the articles were from Asia (۶۰%). The highest number of publicationswere observed in ۲۰۱۲ and ۲۰۲۰. A multidisciplinary team were involved in ۷۲% of theresearches and ۶۸% were conducted in more than one research center. Most articles have beenpublished in Q۱ quality journals (۴۸%) and high-income countries accounted for the largest percentage(۵۶) and ۳۲% of them were aimed at patient care. RFID was the mostly used and ۶۶.۶۷%of them was about the implementation of a smart hospital.Conclusion: Smart hospitals can not only result in improved service provision and quality inhospitals, but can also be effective in larger ecosystems such as smart cities providing healthcareservices. Many believe that using smart tools in a hospital setting is similar to a “Smart Hospital”,but it is much more than that. Actually, smart hospital is a dynamic digitalized environment witha core of artificial intelligence based on many integrated technological innovations aimed to providemaximum and real-time benefits for all connected individuals.

Keywords:

Smart Hospital , Digital Hospital , Smart Device , Smart Health