Healthcare 4.0 – Managing a Holistic Transformation

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.