5/14/2025–|Last update: 20:21 (Mecca time)
Technical innovations have penetrated widely in all different business sectors, and they became a pivotal part of many businesses around the world, but this penetration avoiding the health sector in general and the hospital sector specifically, as technical innovations remained just an additional tool used by human hands in hospitals and the health sector, unlike some sectors that have been entrusted with complete tasks that were removed from the human hands list.
The failure of the technical sector and its innovations to penetrate the hospitals and convert its mechanism of work into an innovative technical mechanism for palaces in the strength of technical innovations or wrong results, but rather because of the unique privacy that the medical sector has that makes the consequences of errors in it very dangerous.
However, some hospitals and bodies around the world are now trying to harness these technical innovations in order to achieve a new success in facilitating the arrival of treatment and medical service for everyone who needs them, through what is known as virtual hospitals, and several hospitals in the world, including the virtual health hospital supported by the Saudi Ministry of Health.
What are the virtual hospitals?
The idea of virtual hospitals has supported the imagination of the pioneers of the health sector since the “Kovid-19” epidemic, which has received great access to medical treatment, either due to the fear of infection or overcrowding in some hospitals.
With the development of virtual reality technologies and the tools that they harness, the idea of virtual hospitals has become closer to reality, and their application began in several places around the world, and as its name suggests, virtual hospitals are hospitals that give up the physical central site, and replace it with virtual units to meet doctors and obtain the necessary health care.
It can be said that virtual hospitals are a mechanism to meet doctors and health experts by default without the need to leave your home while obtaining the same medical care that you can get in the usual hospitals.
The difference between virtual hospitals and virtual medical consultations
In some countries, doctors can provide medical advice by default through tools such as “Zoom” and “Google Mitt” and other meeting tools and video calls, and despite the similarity of the idea of working between these consultations and the virtual hospital, the mechanism of applying this idea is very different.
While the doctor works individually or with his direct aides through virtual consultations, the virtual hospital is a full -meaning hospital but only by default, that is, the hospital has a reception department, an analysis department and an analysis department, and although these departments all collect data directly from the patient, they do their work and may request analyzes, and send a team to analyze or obtain radiation directly from the patient’s house.
The primary difference between virtual consultations and virtual hospitals is the work mechanism and the collection and preservation of information, as any doctor working in the virtual hospital can reach detailed medical history without the need for the patient to ask about it, as this date is stored in hospital servers in the end.
Administrative superiority
Virtual Hospitals provide a better work mechanism than usual hospitals, and it allows the hospital administration to deal with patients and their employees better than usual hospitals. In the end, you can avoid crowding in the hospital, whether workers or visitors.
Virtual Hospitals also provide more freedom of the medical teams in them at work, as the doctor does not need to allocate a fixed time daily for the presence in its place, and he can work easily and conveniently and choose the appropriate times for him or even respond to emergency situations quickly and easy.
In a purely administrative side, the virtual hospital is more funding than traditional hospitals, which directly needs high and expensive operating costs at a lot of times, so some companies may resort in the future to benefit from them.
Access to medical care from anywhere in the world
Virtual hospitals provide an unable to overlook the patients, as the patient can access the medical care he needs anywhere in the world, and we assume that the patient is traveling to another country in a state of tourism and he needs to review his doctor who has his sick record, instead of trying to reconcile the new doctor in the tourist country and the doctor who is aware of the sick history, the patient can review his doctor from outside the country with ease.
On the other hand, it allows residents in places in which health cadres may not have access to doctors with experience and a high level, as the patient can communicate with any doctor in the world and obtain the advice he desires.
Also, these hospitals provide the time of patients significantly, and make traditional hospitals dedicated to patients that cannot be dealt with through virtual hospitals, which saves the patient’s time and medical teams’ efforts to deal with emergency cases only.
Punish challenges
Despite all these advantages, virtual hospitals face a variety of challenges, most of which lie in emergency medical conditions or that need a personal medical review, and in this case, the doctor can transfer the condition to any nearby hospital or communicate even with friendly facilities and follow up on the situation remotely.
It should be noted that some cases and diseases need to be monitored directly from the doctor during the examination, which makes the idea of virtual hospitals limited to use significantly.
Successful models
In 2022, the Saudi Ministry of Health inaugurated the Virtual Health Hospital, to be the first step for the digital transformation of hospitals by relying on modern technologies, and it works in cooperation with 224 traditional hospitals, which allowed them to reach rare experiences in more than 44 accurate specialties.
Also, the Virtual Health Hospital tried to overcome some of the challenges facing virtual hospitals, among them the surveillance wings of patients, as it created virtual monitoring wings, as the patients send a group of sensors that are installed at home in order to monitor the patient’s health condition without leaving his home, and it should be noted that the hospital won the title of the largest virtual hospital in the world based on the Guinness Book of the numbers Standard.
Also, BUPA, the international private health care group, is trying to follow the same method in building a huge virtual hospital, and this hospital is planned to open this summer, with a slightly different method that combines virtual hospitals and traditional hospitals.
The virtual hospital approach resulted in a group of impressive results in Ireland as well, based on the description of Derek Okif, a consultant doctor and professor of medical devices technology from Galwai during his conversation with the “Financial Times” newspaper.
Derek runs a virtual clinic on Claire Island on the western Ireland beach, where artificial intelligence and remote sensors are used to monitor the pathological condition of a group of chronic diseases, including chronic pulmonary obstruction, as well as a group of different heart diseases, and according to Derek’s description, the residents of this island need to move through more than one way to reach the main righteousness and obtain the necessary health care for them.
Do virtual hospitals succeed?
The idea of virtual hospitals faces many challenges like any new technology, but with more health care innovations and easily available to the user, this idea may succeed and receive popularity in some medical sectors.
But it is certain that it will not replace traditional hospitals due to the need for these hospitals that provide everything that the patient needs, and can save his life in some cases.
