An Architecture for a Cyber-Physical Healthcare Delivery System with Human Agents

The traditional monolithic hospital focused health-care system organically developed to address acute conditions. In recent years, healthcare needs have shifted from treating acute conditions to meeting an unprecedented chronic disease burden. The long-term complex nature of chronic diseases imposes requirements on 1.) the individual: to actively participate in their healthcare rather than only passively receive treatment(s) and 2.) the healthcare system: to evolve towards a Smart City enabled, intelligent, cyber-physical system capable of smart data acquisition both within and outside the clinic to provide care when and where the individual requires it. This presents a formidable systems challenge where the state of the healthcare delivery system must be coordinated over many years or decades with the health state of each individual that seeks care for their chronic conditions. This paper architects a system model for personalized healthcare delivery and managed individual health outcomes. To ground the discussion, the work builds upon recent structural analysis of mass-customized production systems as an analogous system and then highlights the stochastic evolution of an individual's health state as a key distinguishing feature. Architecting a coordinated system model such as this one opens several avenues for future work to develop and detail the effects of the cyber-physical nature and the latest data acquisition systems of the healthcare system on health outcomes and cost.