Smart Management of Telemedicine Rooms in an e-Hospital Emergency Department

Abstract

The rapidly growing population and the current global healthcare issues can take advantage of the ongoing technological improvements to enhance human life quality. In healthcare, the use of telemedicine can provide high-quality services for medical evaluation without location restrictions. Telemedicine can significantly improve service quality, personnel management, and resource utilization in the emergency department, reducing operational budget and problems like overcrowding. This chapter presents a dynamic personnel allocation system to manage a fluctuating number of remote physicians, opposite to traditional management practices. The proposed healthcare paradigm is based on telemedicine-based management, requiring a validation simulation tools Discrete Event Simulation (DES). This smart management system was solved using control theory techniques enhanced with soft-computing algorithms like Genetic and Memetic algorithms. This concept’s potential implementation requires extensive use of concepts like the Internet of Things (IoT), achieving an e-Hospital with a smart management system. This work most significant results were the Emergency Department service quality maximization and reduced operational costs under normal and abnormal conditions. The identified improvements were measured using different key performance indicators, which helped evaluate this proposal’s improvements quantitatively. Consequently, the service quality and personnel wellbeing were improved. This proposal presents a novel synergy between healthcare management and current disrupting technologies that belongs to the fourth industrial revolution. Likewise, it opens and spreads a consistent perspective of dynamic personnel shifting, integrating healthcare management concepts, telemedicine, automatic control, soft computing, IoT, Industry 4.0, and Health 4.0.