Smart hospitals worldwide: a systematic review

TThe term “Smart hospital” is a highly comprehensive concept and it has not received the attention it deserves among researchers, as it is more than using a smart tool in a hospital. This study was designed to conduct a review of smart hospitals. In this systematic review, 808 studies were identified using keywords through searches on PubMed, Science Direct, Embase, Scopus and IEEE databases. After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria (705 based on abstracts and titles and 35 after reading full texts) and removing duplicates (43), 25 studies were included in this review. Geographically, of the majority of the articles were from Asia (60%). The highest number of publications was observed in 2012 and 2020. A multidisciplinary team was involved in 72% of the research, and 68% were conducted in more than one research center. Most articles have been published in Q1 quality journals (48%), and high-income countries accounted for the largest percentage (56). Notably, 32% of these studies focused on patient care. RFID technology was the most used technology, featured in 66.67% of the studies, which primarily centered on the implementation of smart hospitals. It should be noted that development or implementation of a smart device in a hospital should not be equated with the implementation of a smart hospital and it is far beyond that.