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Smart Hospitals

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When confronted with the concept of a "Smart Hospital" you probably conjured images of science fiction and/or magical hospital equipment that can diagnose and treat patients without touching them, let alone cutting them up. Sorry. having fancy medical devices does not make hospitals smart.

Perhaps you thought of a smart hospitals as one that uses AI, and specifically machine learning, to find very specific sub-types of cancer and tailor treatments accordingly. Unfortunately, precision medicine does not mean smart hospitals.

Simply put, smart hospitals are ones that learn from their mistakes. All hospitals that practice evidence based medicine act on expected outcomes. "If I follow this guideline, the patient should get better" is the general expectation. Smart hospitals do that too. The difference is that smart hospitals actually keep track and learn from this experience. In a smart hospital, every patient visit consists of thousands of data points which can be used to measure how well a protocol was adhered to, how the patient improved during (and after) the visit.

Smart hospitals can have futuristic medical devices or not, they could practice precision medicine, or they could not. What makes them smart is that they not only collect data, but also use these data to adopt practices that lead to better health for patients, and avoid procedures that tend to put patients at risk.

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