Automation in Hospitals and Health Care

Abstract

We are sure that patient-centric health care is required for improving quality of life (QoL). To realize patient-centric health care, the burden and workload of doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals must be reduced by using cutting-edge technologies to concentrate on patients’ care for improving quality of medicine. This means that human-centric health care improves QOL not only for patients but also for doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals. There have been several major technological advancements over the past decades. Smart devices, cloud computing, AI (artificial intelligence), robotics, and the Internet of Things (IoT) can make big contributions to accelerating digital transformation in hospitals and health care. As for the network environment, the utilization of 5G is expected to create new healthcare applications remotely. Use cases of application are rapidly expanding with the spread of the advancements described above. The applications can be categorized along with the patient care cycle from prevention, testing, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. The applications are mainly used in medical institutions, but they are also expanding outside of medical institutions, such as patients at home and remote patient monitoring. These situations are rapidly expanding owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, each application using cutting-edge technologies allows the situation of application silo and data silo to be accelerated without any standard and digital platform. We are required to contribute to making some standards such as application programing interface, terminology, and data format. In addition, we are also required to realize digital platforms with views from doctors, nurses, healthcare professionals, and patient usability and true benefits. Useful applications can be utilized easily by doctors, nurses, healthcare professionals, and patients as needed, realizing data connectivity and a data integration environment for visualizing real situations of human resources, asset utilization, clinical outcome, etc., in hospitals and health care. Digital transformation in hospitals and health care is very important not only for patients but also for doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals. This means not just patient-centric health care but human-centric health care.