Smart hospitals: architecture, key technologies & benefits

January 9, 2024

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Smart hospitals

by Andrey Korzun, Head of Healthcare Solutions Department

A smart hospital is a digital interconnected healthcare ecosystem with quick and secure data exchange between medical devices and IT systems. Smart hospitals can streamline clinical and administrative workflows, enhance operational efficiency, and improve patient experiences and health outcomes.

Hospitals are extremely intricate organizations based on a sprawling network of people, processes, and assets, where inefficiency can have a catastrophic impact on people’s health. In recent years, technological innovation has aided healthcare providers, enabling the creation of a modern and more efficient smart hospital.

With 25+ years of experience in healthcare IT, Itransition helps healthcare providers set up smart hospitals by providing medical device software development, as well as consulting, analytical and integration services.

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Scheme title: Smart hospital market growth rate by region (2022-2027)

Data source: mordorintelligence.com — Smart hospital market size & share analysis

Smart technologies for healthcare settings

Ordinary hospitals can use innovative technology sporadically and without a significant transformation of essential workflows. Meanwhile, a smart hospital employs tools like 5G connectivity, AI, IoT, augmented reality, and others in most of its workflows to automate and enhance clinical and business processes. One healthcare facility can employ one or more of the following technologies in order to improve its healthcare services and qualify as a smart hospital.

The Internet of Things

Smart beds
Blood collection devices
Medical imaging machines
Inventory real-time location trackers
Pharmacy barcode readers
Temperature, humidity, and hygiene sensors
Patient monitoring gadgets
Robot-assisted surgeries

Artificial intelligence

Patient support and educational chatbots
Medical image enhancement and discerning
Drug effect modeling
Enhanced medical images for educational purposes
Big data analytics software for diagnostics
Document management automation

mHealth

Complementary mobile apps for telemedicine suites
Patient apps for managing electronic medical records
Remote access to healthcare systems for clinicians
Convenient appointment scheduling
On-the-go medication order management
Patient care materials for nursing personnel and caregivers

Telehealth

Virtual consultations
Real-time communication between patients and care providers
Continuous patient monitoring
Remote diagnostics
Knowledge exchange between healthcare professionals
Real-time data sharing among multiple healthcare facilities

Extended reality

Enhanced diagnostic images
VR-enabled remote surgeries
AR-based educational materials
2D images to 3D models conversion
Healthcare facilities’ virtual modeling

Blockchain

Drug tracing tools
Enhanced patient data security
Clinical trial security
Cryptocurrency medical payments
Medical staff credentialing
Secure e-prescriptions

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Smart hospital architecture

A smart hospital consists of multiple systems that are connected to each other and a single cloud server where the majority of shared data is stored and processed. The type of systems included varies from organization to organization, depending on the healthcare providers’ specialties, services, and needs. However, the basic concept of intelligent software flawlessly integrated with each other remains the same.

EHR

Patient health records are the most valuable source of data that can be used for patient treatment personalization as well as the basis for population health management, preventive healthcare campaigns, and medical research. Smart technologies like blockchain, RPA, and AI-powered analytics can both assure EHR data safety, its secure transfer, and efficient processing.

Hospital management software

Medical equipment and software made part of the Internet of Medical Things help keep track of hospital inventory easier, create a safe environment for patients, and facilitate more even resource and task distribution, contributing to more efficient hospital management.

Healthcare CRM

Supplementing your medical CRM with analytical capabilities and conversational AI can make marketing and sales campaigns more personalized, transparent, and efficient, as well as save time on documentation management.

Medical image analysis

Combined with machine learning-based anomaly detection and pattern recognition, AI-powered computer vision can easily identify signs of potential health complications from medical images and complement physicians’ expertise for more accurate diagnoses.

Laboratory management system

RPA tools can automatically transfer data between lab information systems and EHRs, assisting in document management. Meanwhile, advanced analytical mechanisms can process data from LIS and draw more accurate insights from lab tests.

Patient portals

Integrating patient portals with smart technologies like healthcare-specific NLP can help patients find educational materials about their condition quicker, better understand their test results, or automatically schedule appointments with care providers according to their treatment or immunization timelines.

Pharmacy management software

Smart hospitals are not aimed at clinicians only, as pharma companies also benefit from automating inventory, prescription, documentation, and financial management with RPA tools. Moreover, they can use powerful analytics solutions and blockchain to discover more effective drugs and protect patients from fraud.

Financial software

Automation can make insurance claims’ processing faster and more efficient. In the meantime, smart contracts and innovative payment processing software can make paying for health services easier for patients and allow healthcare organizations to receive financial turnaround faster.

Smart hospital use cases

Smart hospitals accounted for a market value of $30 billion in 2021, which serves as additional proof they have become essential in the healthcare industry.

Scheme title: How smart hospitals answer the challenges of modern healthcare

Patient-centric healthcare

Smart hospitals allow medical care providers to focus more on patients' physical and psychological well-being. This can be achieved by setting up dedicated physical and digital spaces and crafting patient engagement strategies to enhance patient experience and speed up their recovery (the so-called healing environments). Examples include mobile apps for self-service scheduling and 24/7 clinical record accessibility, teledermatology apps for self-check up, AI-powered smart triage solutions, and health wearables and other telemedicine tools that constantly monitor patients from home.

Benefits

Enhanced patient experience
Better patient outcomes
Less pressure on the ER and ICU

Workflow automation

Another way for smart hospitals to mitigate operational and administrative burden is through automation, be it physical (with actual robots) or digital (robotic process automation bots). The adoption of robotics and artificial intelligence tools to streamline clinical processes, coupled with IoT for patient data collection, remarkably enhances the accuracy and efficiency of routine hospital operations and grants physicians more time and energy to focus on patient well-being.

Benefits

Resource and time savings
Better workload distribution among care teams
Solving staff shortage problems

Data-driven medical care

Smart hospitals complement physicians' experience and intuition with solid data analytics solutions for more efficient risk identification and diagnostics. This requires collecting patient data from EHRs or via wearables and processing it with machine learning-powered analytical systems to better understand their conditions. A similar logic applies to medical equipment, which can be monitored with dedicated sensors to spot any signs of malfunction and recommend suitable maintenance operations.

Benefits

More precise diagnostics and clinical decision-making
Enhanced preventive health management
Improved patient safety

Healthcare interoperability

Hospitals are not just a bunch of technical assets but rather complex systems combining technologies, processes, and professionals. Successful healthcare digital transformation requires full harmonization inside all system components. Due to their high-speed connectivity and sophisticated data protection protocols, smart hospitals serve as hubs that facilitate unobstructed secure data flow between different departments and facilities, private practitioners, laboratories, pharmacies, and even insurance providers.

Benefits

Enhanced data security
Streamlined patient journeys
Higher job satisfaction rates among healthcare professionals

Real-life examples of smart hospitals

Healthcare industry players who implemented smart technologies into essential administrative or clinical workflows have witnessed their beneficial effect on the entire organization.

2x

cost reduction

BPM automation for UK care homes

We delivered a cloud-based application that helps UK care homes to organize employees’ shifts and workload with thousands of predefined tasks, gives a full view of task fulfillment, and provides insight into employee performance. With the automation of the majority of business processes, long-term care facilities significantly increased their efficiency.

2x

submitted reports

Mobile adverse event reporting app

We implemented an mHealth application that enables patients and healthcare professionals to capture, process, and report adverse event data in real-time. The app doubled the report creation speed and reduced manual efforts associated with the process by 95%, which led to more submitted reports and enhanced drug safety.

€ 1 mn

saved

Philips PerformanceFlow

Example by Philips

A hospital in Amsterdam was able to speed up the location of their smart hospital beds, ECG or ultrasound machines, infusion pumps, and other mobile equipment by 20%. The automation of hospital inventory management allowed healthcare personnel to become more efficient, prevented theft and misplacement of equipment, and saved costs.

63%

less transfers to the ICU

Philips patient monitoring solution

Example by Philips

A Saratoga Hospital in New York implemented healthcare predictive modeling with a solution monitoring patients’ vital signs to identify people with deteriorating conditions early and prevent crisis situations. This solution also connects to the hospital’s EHR, providing datasets to tune healthcare analytics software further.

2x

cost reduction