Healthcare 4.0 – Managing a Holistic Transformation
In 2022, Dr. Imad Jawhar, Head of the Computer Engineering Department at the Al Maaref University, participated in a conference paper titled "Healthcare 4.0 – Managing a Holistic Transformation".
This study was conducted in collaboration with Prof. by Nader Mohamed, Department of Computer Science - University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Nader Kesserwan, Department of Engineering - SEMS Robert Morris University, and Prof. Jameela Al-Jaroodi, Department of Engineering -Robert Morris University.
Abstract:
Healthcare systems have evolved quickly with the introduction of information communication and technologies (ICT) and the digitization movement. Recently, these systems are going through further transformations to digitalize healthcare services and introduce smartness culminating into what is currently dubbed “Healthcare 4.0”. Efforts to introduce Healthcare 4.0 and create effective and smart healthcare services has significantly increased. A Healthcare 4.0 infrastructure will not only make healthcare services smart and highly available, but it will create the necessary framework that will allow healthcare systems to expand their capabilities quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, much of the efforts to transform and digitalize healthcare systems are isolated and apply different approaches, tools, technologies and models. In addition, there are many integration and compatibility issues across different healthcare systems especially among systems that already exist and proposed new ones. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to integrate them or support collaboration across the disjoint healthcare systems to achieve the Healthcare 4.0 vision. We believe that a unified vision and a strategic approach to implementing Healthcare 4.0 is necessary and that long-term planning will help reduce some of the issues and create more systemic capabilities to connect current systems, integrate new ones and add advanced functionalities and smart capabilities. In this paper, we discuss the challenges facing these efforts and the importance of using a strategic approach to manage the healthcare systems transformation and adopt healthcare 4.0.