Secure and Intelligent Smart Hospitals

Abstract

The rapid digitalization of healthcare has transformed hospitals into complex cyber–physical ecosystems integrating Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), artificial intelligence, and data-driven decision support systems. While these technologies enable intelligent and personalized healthcare services, they also introduce significant challenges related to data security, privacy, interoperability, and trust. This chapter proposes a blockchain-enabled digital twin architecture for secure and intelligent smart hospital ecosystems. Digital twins provide real-time virtual representations of patients, medical devices, and clinical workflows, enabling predictive analytics and operational optimization, while blockchain establishes a decentralized trust layer ensuring data integrity, provenance, and auditable governance. A six-layer reference architecture is presented, detailing cross-layer interactions between data acquisition, digital twin modeling, analytics, visualization, and blockchain-based consent and audit mechanisms.