Healthcare Technology as Infrastructure: Building Interoperable, Sustainable, and Scalable Health Systems

Hospitals and health systems depend on increasingly complex digital infrastructure, electronic health records, devices, imaging, scheduling, and analytics, to underpin modern care delivery. Yet persistent issues like duplicate documentation, unreliable data, and workflow breakdowns reveal the central challenge: not the absence of new tools, but the absence of robust infrastructure to support them.Research and policy are shifting from evaluating isolated technologies to developing the governance, standards, and operational discipline that ensure tools function safely and reliably at scale. As AI and data-driven systems become more common, there is an even greater need for ongoing oversight, clear responsibility, and alignment with clinical realities, regulation, and workforce needs. More technology alone is not the answer; progress depends on disciplined integration and continuous evaluation in complex, real-world healthcare environments.Sustainable and resilient health systems require more than adopting the latest digital solutions. Success relies on organizational infrastructure, covering governance, standards, workforce design, lifecycle management, and real-world outcomes. Sometimes, this means limiting, redesigning, or even removing technologies that add risk or fragmentation.This Research Topic invites contributions that view technology as part of a broader organizational infrastructure. We welcome work that addresses how digital and AI systems are governed, implemented, constrained, and evaluated within complex health systems to achieve safety, interoperability, and equity in routine care.Topics include:• Health system architecture and infrastructure design• Interoperability, standards adoption, workflow alignment, and the limits of current approaches• Governance and accountability for digital and AI systems• Oversight of AI: model drift, transparency, fairness, and regulatory alignment• Workforce adaptation and human factors• Implementation at scale, vendor management, lifecycle and change management, de-implementation• Analysis of failures and unintended consequences of digital integration• System-level analytics, simulation, and visualization for decision-making• Sustainable, resilient systems, including continuity and maintainability• Policy and regulation shaping deployment, oversight, and accountability• Equity, access, and the impact of infrastructure decisions on disparities Topic editors: Tamiko Eto, Vijay Kumar Chattu, Ivan Miguel Pires Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/79742/healthcare-technology-as-infrastructure-building-interoperable-sustainable-and-scalable-health-systems