The Impact of Industry 4.0 on Healthcare System Engineering

The introduction of Industry 4.0 vision created huge potentials for many industrial sectors to optimize their operations. Thus they can improve their productivity, cost-effectiveness, reliability, quality, and flexibility. One important sector that can effectively benefit from this vision is healthcare. The Industry 4.0 version of healthcare is named Healthcare Industry 4.0 or Health 4.0 in short. Health 4.0 is based on new technologies to deliver enhanced and value-added healthcare services for patients. Health 4.0 will highly impact healthcare system engineering (HCSE), which applies engineering analysis and design principles to enhance healthcare services. In this paper, we discuss and analyze this impact. We attempt to identify the relationship between Health 4.0 and healthcare system engineering. We also identify the challenges of the different roles in healthcare system engineering and address how Health 4.0 can provide solutions for these challenges.