CUHK Medical Centre is a private teaching hospital wholly owned by The Chinese University of Hong Kong. It is the first hospital in Hong Kong designed with “smart” IT infrastructure. The Smart Hospital strategy was developed based on the Triple Aim for healthcare organizations – to promote better health, better care, and better values for the patients. The 3-prong strategy includes the development of a full electronic patient record, the use of mobile technology to support the patients, doctors, nurses, and pharmacists, and the incorporation of Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure. To support the IoT applications, the Hospital is set up with the most updated standard of WiFi, mobile 5G, Ultra-wide Band (UWB), Bluetooth (BLE), and RFID. The IoT technology allows real time location tracking of patients and assets.
However, the IT infrastructure only provides the foundation for the Hospital to become “smart”. In the actual operations, the complicated processes in healthcare often require human adjustments to the system. In the presentation, the cases of billing and managing patients’ own medication are used as examples to illustrates that Smart Hospital development is a learning process. In the case of billing, the complexity in a private hospital goes way beyond the original expectation. Above all, the system would have to cater for the need for unanticipated changes in patient or customer requests. In the case of patients’ own medication, it has to address all prescriptions not entered by the doctors directly using the Medication Order Entry system. Hence, learning to be smart is a journey in the development of the Smart Hospital.
