Weakness of Modern Hospitals

IntroductIon Until some decades ago, health care services were primarily supplied inside hospitals. The patient had to move from his or her home to the hospital, where various diagnostic and therapeutic treatments were provided. Moreover, inside the same hospital, the various tools and processes were insulated and autonomous. Patients and doctors had to move from one tool to another, often placed in different areas, to acquire the different resources. Information provided by these tools was generally collected via paper records. These records were then physically moved (generally in a very inefficient way) from one place to another in order to exchange information. In many situations, these records represented the most critical element in the health system due to misunderstanding, errors, and loss of information caused by their use. Nevertheless, its main drawback was the difficulty, or even the impossibility, to retrieve information from paper records when there were needs in the future and/or outside the hospital. This situation was largely inefficient, especially from the patient's point of view. Indeed, he or she had to spend a lot of time moving to and from the hospital and supporting a great deal of stress to supply time and again the same information (often in an incomplete, vague, or erroneous manner), and eventually suffering for errors and/or unavailability of information previously stored in other records. To overcome this drawback, in the past few years, the health care systems has largely changed the way in which their services are produced and supplied. In order to improve the quality (e.g., better diagnosis and treatments), guarantee more comfort to the patients, increase the efficiency of the systems (e.g., reducing time in hospital and, more generally, any type of side-effects), and have a more rational use of the money, ICT (information and communication technologies) has spread throughout fields of health care. Indeed, due to the power of ICT to make interoperable the different elements and actors, useful synergies have been exploited to better use any resource. This contributes to improve the quality of the services (qualified and specialized services may be provided in spite of geographical location) and, at the same time, to improve efficiency (because it is possible to better distribute loads and to exploit synergy and scale economy). To achieve this result, the various apparatuses, components, and systems (once autonomous entities) are no longer insulated but rather are grouped into networks to allow sharing information, …