The Rise of the Intelligent Health System

Over the last decade the changing healthcare environment has driven hospitals to critically evaluate and optimize their operations to enhance patient treatment and care. Hospitals have moved to support an increasing outpatient care environment, driving an increased in-patient acuity levels. At many institutions these changes have been accompanied with regulatory and financial constraints impacting capital and operating budgets as well as impacting staffing. Specific hospital wide initiatives, such as the Joint Commission's patient safety goals, electronic medical record and meaning full use have driven institutions to re-design their operations to create what has been defined as the Intelligent Hospital. To deal with the complexity of patient care workflows, enhance patient diagnosis, treatment, care, safety and satisfaction, home health and telemedicine the design of Intelligent Hospitals has focused on the integration of diverse technologies, to provide a seamless exchange of information. This book outlines the technologies and clinical applications which constitute the fundamentals of the Intelligent Hospital and the technologies that support patient care and health management across a spectrum of healthcare environments, the home, remote offices and treatment facilities and the hospital itself.

The book will introduce the changing environment of care resulting in new distributions of patients across a broad spectrum of the patient acuity and care environments, including the Intelligent Hospital; supporting treatment areas, such as the OR, Radiation Therapy, interventional radiology, patient care areas, such as the ICU, ambulatory / telemetry as well as all supporting functionality, including infection control, laboratory medicine, pathology, biomedical engineering, Informatics and Information Technology; I-Home supporting networked dynamically interact with the technologies and application in a variety of care settings. These include the traditional patient care and treatment environments, such as the OR, ICU, Trauma ED, Labor and Delivery, as well as Outpatient Center, Digital Hospital supply chain suite, advanced Biomedical Engineering and the i-HOME(TM) (i.e. Connected Smart Home/Intelligent Medical Home). Telemedicine systems, sensors and transducer to enable complex and seamless patient monitoring at home; as well as series of remote healthcare environments, including the office, and same day treatment areas.

Each chapter will describe the fundamentals of integrating diverse technologies and clinical systems to create a seamless environment enabling data to be share across the complete spectrum care environment, starting from the ambulance, through the emergency room, diagnostics, treatment and recovery in the hospital to the home environment. As summarized in the table of contents the book will highlight and detail specific topics, including medical devices and applications, robotic, supply management, location-based services, artificial intelligence, etc., focusing on connectivity, integrations and architecture to create a seamless environment.

dynamically interact with the technologies and application in a variety of care settings. These include the traditional patient care and treatment environments, such as the OR, ICU, Trauma ED, Labor and Delivery, as well as Outpatient Center, Digital Hospital supply chain suite, advanced Biomedical Engineering and the i-HOME(TM) (i.e. Connected Smart Home/Intelligent Medical Home).