Search

Smart hospitals increasingly combine artificial intelligence, real-time data streams, operational dashboards, and automated decision support to coordinate care delivery. These systems aim to improve hospital throughput, staff efficiency, resource use, and patient safety. This systematic review synthesised evidence on AI technologies used in smart hospital management from 2017 to 2023. The review focused on command centers, real-time workflow monitoring, operational dashboards, and automated decision support systems. A PRISMA 2020-compliant review process was used, including structured database searching, dual screening, and narrative synthesis. Extracted data covered study characteristics, AI methods, deployment maturity, data sources, integration patterns, and reported operational impact. The evidence base was concentrated on hospital command centers, predictive dashboards, and patient-flow analytics. Real-time workflow monitoring and automated decision support were less mature, and prospective evaluations of operational or clinical impact were uncommon. AI-enabled smart hospital management is technologically promising but remains unevenly implemented and weakly evaluated. Current evidence supports cautious adoption, local validation, and stronger evaluation designs before claims of sustained operational transformation are accepted.

Hospital staff routinely spend substantial cognitive effort locating operational policies, staffing rules, escalation pathways, and dashboard metrics across fragmented repositories. This hidden search burden can slow decision-making during high-pressure clinical operations. Current hospital knowledge environments rarely support natural-language policy questions answered from the institution’s own approved documents. Staff may know what they need to ask, but not where the relevant rule, protocol, or dashboard field is stored. This article proposes a retrieval-augmented clinical operations assistant that accepts free-text questions and retrieves relevant passages from local policy repositories and structured operational data sources. The assistant would synthesize a grounded response while exposing the sources used to generate the answer. The proposed assistant includes a document ingestion pipeline, a vector store, a permissioned large language model, a real-time dashboard connector, and a simple chat interface embedded in the hospital intranet. These components would work together to make local protocols, staffing guidelines, bed management rules, and escalation pathways conversationally accessible. The assistant would be expected to reduce staff search burden, improve visibility of current policy, and support more consistent use of institutional operating rules. Its value would depend on strict grounding in authoritative documents, robust version control, and clear boundaries when policies are missing or contradictory. A retrieval-augmented clinical operations assistant represents an early step toward conversational, trustworthy, and continually updated operational decision support. Such a system should complement, rather than replace, human judgment and formal policy governance.