From digital to smart hospitals: past, present and the future

The increased demands to reduce costs while improving health outcomes and effective healthcare service delivery led to the introduction of smart hospitals. The concept of “smart hospital” is an emerging research area that involves the digitization of healthcare systems by utilizing intelligent digital health innovations and advanced technologies. Despite the potential benefits of embracing smart hospital, there is a dearth of literature on this concept. Therefore, this chapter presents a comprehensive analysis of smart hospitals, digital innovations and technologies that enable them to achieve effective implementation and utilization of smart hospitals. The chapter also presents adoption barriers and recommendations for the effective implementation of smart hospital. The study also revealed that smart hospital technologies support remote access to care and enhance operational efficiency, disease diagnosis, detection and treatment using advanced technologies. Such technologies include the Internet of Things (IoT), intelligent sensor networks, artificial intelligence, telehealth and telemedicine, wearable technologies, the Internet of Medical Things, deep learning, smart applications, robotics, Blockchain, machine learning and cloud computing. However, lack of guiding policies and framework, context-aware computing and cognitive computing challenges, stochastic computation, cybersecurity issues, ethical, and financial hurdles and lack of resources are among the implementation barriers.