Smart Hospitals: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Smart healthcare technologies are widely in use for the prevention and early diagnosis of diseases and are instrumental in transforming conventional medical care to patient-centric care. However, the traditional hospitals cannot entirely be replaced by home health systems, rather forcing them to become smart. The future smart hospitals are expected to have artificial intelligence (AI) tools for performing the patient diagnosis and robots for performing surgeries. The physicians will have the managing role, which could be performed through a touchscreen. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities associated with smart hospitals, and how they contribute to the objective of quality healthcare for everyone. The methodology used for the research is literature review. Machines do not have the common sense and blindly do what human beings instruct them to do. Thus, in spite of the digitalization and technology transformation of the healthcare processes, we cannot have hospitals without the human element.