Virtual hospital; A way for public health development

The history of information technology in the medical process goes back to the eighteenth century. Virtual hospital is one of these technologies, that NASA used for the first time to monitor the health status of astronauts in the different situations. We aimed to evaluate the merits of a virtual hospital for the future.

Our literature search was limited to English and Persian databases. We searched ISI Web of Science, Science Direct, Scopus, Magiran, SID and IranMedex, Medline, EMBASE, CINAHL by using the keywords “Telemedicine “ and “ Virtual hospital “from 1998 to 2015. In addition, the references of articles retrieved were searched for additional

The Virtual Hospital like a digital library system, offer specialized medical information about providing care to patients and care providers. Purposes and usages of Virtual Hospital are to educate patients,
health professionals and students, improving the treatment of patients, patient health retrieval and raise life expectancy. Other applications is using the latest, most popular and reliable health information, research and information exchange in the world, estimated costs and organizing and managing the hospital in the best way.

The virtual hospital serves as an applied information system that is considered as a training system for hospital managers at all levels and it is expected that it is used more in the future given the further developments.