A Review of Smart Healthcare System Re-construction in the Post-epidemic Era: Conceptual Framework and Challenges

The traditional facilities and practice protocols of healthcare system face significant challenges to meet the needs of an aging population, increased patients with chronic diseases and emergency responses. The outbreak of COVID-19 makes the need for the greater efficiency and responsiveness of healthcare more urgent. It is believed that the transformation toward smart healthcare system changes the healthcare system in an all-round way and provides more efficient, convenient, and personalized service. However, few articles systematically probed into the current status and mechanism of smart healthcare system. This article thus aims to identify the functions and conceptual framework of smart healthcare system, and explore the challenges of reconstructing healthcare system. This article reviewed a total of 2813 articles on smart healthcare system from Web of Science (WOS). Firstly, this article examined the status quo of research development on the smart healthcare system, and established the network of co-occurring keywords using VOSviewer. Secondly, this article established the conceptual framework of smart healthcare system, which includes three major aspects, i.e. smart facility management (FM), organizational management (OM) and medical system (MS). Thirdly, this article identified the five groups of challenges in the smart healthcare system reconstruction. The findings of this article provide a systems framework and reference for the reconstruction of smart healthcare system. It is also believed that the research outcome would help medical institutions better prepared for future emergency events and pandemics.