3.3. Digital Hospital Transformation in Turkey
With parallel to digitalization trend in the world, the Turkish Ministry of Health included the vision of transformation of public hospitals into digital hospitals in their strategic plan for 2013-2017. The digital hospital is defined by the Ministry of Health (2017) as “Hospital information management system, digital medical records, PACS, digital medical archive, barcode, RFID technologies, drug and material tracking, mobile and tablet computers, medical technologies, smart buildings, energy, lighting technologies and information technologies. systems, communication systems, data, sound, video and multimedia technologies, tele-medicine, tele-education, virtual autopsy, virtual surgery, virtualization, management services, consultancy and all kinds of integrated services, basically it is a fully integrated hospital.” To ensure that this is managed from a single center, the General Directorate of Health Information Systems (SBSGM) of the Ministry of Health was established.