Towards a smart hospital: Smart infrastructure integration

Abstract

In today’s business world, digital technologies have become vital for implementing processes in any company, including the healthcare industry. By utilizing the latest technologies to collect, process, analyze, and transmit data through smart devices and IT infrastructure, it is possible to implement trends in medicine as a value approach, personalization, predictability, and participation. Considering these trends, it is necessary to develop a methodology for creating a management system for medical organizations that can comprehensively and interconnectively develop various elements of the system. This includes business process systems, information systems and application architectures, hardware, and "smart" medical equipment that can fully participate in hospital information exchange. These elements should be developed within a single model. An architectural approach can be used to create a model of a medical organization. This paper examines the integration of smart infrastructure in medical organizations, develops requirements for smart infrastructure services, and creates architectural models based on the findings and requirements. Architecture models were developed for the following elements of the Smart Infrastructure: smart wards, wearable devices and telemedicine stands as the most necessary elements in everyday healthcare. The key discovery of the study is the architecture models of the mentioned elements and their integration with the medical organization IT architecture, described in the form of visual models and data exchange tables. The proposed models can be used both for further research or for practical implementation as the reference models to check up and adopt to each individual case. The solutions proposed in the paper give an example of open innovation philosophy, as they are developed on the basis of open information about the innovation activities of various medical organizations, and, at the same, time the results themselves are openly published and open for adaptation by the scientific and practicing medical community.