What do you think a smart hospital should be like? There should probably be streamlined workflows, a human-centric experience, and better connected data.

All these have been accomplished at Shenshan Medical Center, Memorial Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University.

Located in Shanwei, east of the central coast of the Guangdong province, Shenshan Medical Center was built using funds, talent, and medical resources provided by the Shenzhen government. It is affiliated with Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, the first western hospital in China with first-class medical resources.

In this new era of healthcare, many hospitals are undergoing digital transformation and building smart hospitals. What makes Shenshan Medical Center unique is that they envisioned a smart hospital with industry-leading innovation and digitalization from the start, and they have continued to embrace technical advances over time to improve patient care.

Building a Smart Hospital from Scratch

To transform patient care, the National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China issued a plan of building smart hospitals that can provide:

• Connected devices for medical personnel

Medical devices need to be fully connected to boost efficiency for medical personnel. For example, electronic medical records (EMRs) need to seamlessly connect to medical imaging devices and laboratories.

• Better services for patients

Hospitals need to deploy services that bring new levels of convenience and care to patients, like all-in-one machines, self-service machines, medical electronics, online appointments of registrations, diagnoses, and treatments, real-time reminders, and smart parking.

• Fine-grained management for managers

Technical advances need to be leveraged to transform systems throughout the hospital ecosystem. There needs to be advances in information management, bill settlement, asset management, internal logistics management, and office automation.

However, unforeseen challenges made the smart transformation journey of most hospitals a bumpy ride. They did not realize the crucial role of resource sharing and interoperability. Their clinical and business workflows and assets were not tied together, and data was hard to share across different systems.

Shenshan Medical Center learned from those hospitals and prioritized top-level planning to help improve connectivity between systems, devices, assets, data, and people.

A robust technical foundation is also crucial to a smart hospital. Shenshan Medical Center needed a digital platform that could centrally provide all the ICT infrastructure required by business systems and seamlessly integrate assets and processes across all points of care delivery. They also looked to merge their massive volumes of data generated from diverse systems, create more purpose-built applications, achieve a high degree of coordination, and boost network connectivity.

Building a smart hospital from scratch introduced many challenges to Shenshan Medical Center, but they also felt excited about the possibilities for transforming patient care, improving workflow efficiency, and streamlining management.

Shenshan Medical Center found Huawei to be a partner they can trust to rise to the challenges.

Going All-In on Cloud

Huawei Cloud Stack, backed by Huawei's 30 years of technical expertise in ICT, helped pave the way for Shenshan Medical Center to build a smart hospital.

Huawei Cloud Stack is an on-premises cloud infrastructure platform. It provides Shenshan Medical Center with not only controllable services from a private cloud, but also innovative services from a public cloud. The two types of services deliver consistent experiences, and are constantly being upgraded.

Another important feature of Huawei Cloud Stack is in-house innovation. Medical data is critical to providing high-quality healthcare but often includes sensitive personal data. To protect this sensitive data, Huawei Cloud Stack deploys IT infrastructure on in-house Kunpeng and x86 servers providing intelligent compute, so the infrastructure is secure all the way down to the chips.

Huawei Cloud Stack also provides a unified cloud management platform that features elastic scaling of high-performance, reliable compute and storage resources, collaborative control, resource sharing, and unmatched agility and security. Innovative services like AI and big data on a public cloud are constantly being upgraded and shared with the dedicated cloud for the hospital. The technological advances make O&M intelligent.

Huawei Cloud Stack is more than a technical framework. It provides a holistic approach to building a smart hospital, covering everything from infrastructure to applications.

While matching the organizational structure and workflows of Shenshan Medical Center and helping the hospital set up a robust cloud foundation by moving their assets to the cloud, Huawei Cloud Stack continued to help them develop a mid-end service platform and front-end application platform.

The mid-end service platform was built on Huawei Cloud Stack's ROMA, a microservice framework. It has helped develop over 100 hospital applications enabling comprehensive management, IoT management, smart medical service management, and smart scientific research, all important for a tertiary hospital to succeed.

The microservice-based front-end application platform allows hospital managers to centrally manage EMRs on a unified portal and enables role-based access control for improved security.

Using Huawei Cloud Stack, Shenshan Medical Center has become the first hospital in China to centrally manage all primary data across the entire hospital. The seamless integration of over 100 systems has improved data sharing.

Underpinned by Huawei Cloud Stack's robust solutions and extensive services, Shenshan Medical Center today eases the burden of medical personnel, delivers faster and better patient care, and has streamlined clinical workflows. Moving forward, the smart hospital will continue embracing innovation to usher in a digitalized future.