Resilience and Sustainability for Lean Design of Intensive Care Units. An ICU Case Study

Moving from a deep analysis of the diffusion and the effect of artificial intelligence (AI) based on the concept of Healthcare 5.0 in the period 2019–2024, the goal of this study is the evaluation of a digital twin solution for managing the patients care in intensive care unit (ICU), based on a lean design of the ward and optimized in terms of service resilience and hospital sustainability. In Healthcare 5.0 studies, a respect to patients can be observed through adopting technology such as AI, with a focus of improving patient healthcare delivery. Quantitative and qualitative analysis were combined whereby analysis of secondary data from various databases was conducted and literature review on the impact of AI on healthcare sustainability was employed. The analysis shows that there are differences in AI application and deployment, which occurs in advanced countries and countries that lag. Sustainability is enhanced as optimal use of human, materials, energy, and disposal resources is achieved by accurate and precise AI models. In the same context, however, the article flags many issues: morality, ethics, the quality of dataset and policies and availability of AI technology in countries as issues of access. All these topics are summarized in appropriate variables, parameters and values, subsequently used to define a digital twin in a simulative way, designed on lean service pillars to stabilize the level of care for patients as the levels of demand change (service resilience), as well as to contain costs within a less than proportional range (system sustainability). The paper concludes noting that in to realize universal and accessible health care system, efforts have to be directed toward ensuring that the application of AI is horizontal across the population.