Digital technologies and collective intelligence for healthcare ecosystem: Optimizing Internet of Things adoption for pandemic management

Abstract

This paper proposes a framework based on the collective intelligence principle to understand how the healthcare ecosystem is facing the challenges posed by the COVID-19 by using the Internet of Things (IoT) combined with other digital technologies. The underlying assumption is to consider the Healthcare ecosystem as a collective intelligence system in which the multitude of actors can be coordinated to address the pandemic-specific management challenges. The Italian healthcare ecosystem is analyzed as scenario taking in consideration the ‘genes’ of the collective intelligence: What is being done?, Who is doing it?, Why are they doing it? and How is it being done?. Our analysis introduces policy implications based on a unique decision support system (DSS) to allocate a limited set of IoT devices to a larger group of patients, to balance the alternative needs to improve the conditions of the most severe patients but to maximize the efficiency of device use.