Public health intelligence-ready blueprint for strengthening community resilience: a multi-stakeholder qualitative...

Hospitals must manage complex lifecycles of equipment, consumables, and infrastructure, yet fragmented legacy systems create silos, inefficiencies, and compliance risks that can heighten organizational vulnerability and weaken hospitals' role as critical infrastructures for community resilience.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 stakeholders across seven tertiary hospitals in China (administrators; logistics/procurement; facilities/equipment management; clinical representatives) and analyzed transcripts using a hybrid inductive-deductive thematic approach.

Findings converged on seven challenge areas: (1) lifecycle and maintenance bottlenecks; (2) logistics gaps in procurement, inventory, and high-value consumable traceability; (3) limited oversight of resources and energy; (4) system usability issues and data fragmentation; (5) unmet needs for intelligent capabilities (e.g., predictive maintenance; inventory/energy dashboards; emergency workflows; compliance automation); (6) insufficient role-specific training; and (7) security and privacy constraints. Participants emphasized the need for low-friction, interoperable tools that are integrated with Hospital Information Systems (HIS), Hospital Resource Planning (HRP), Office Automation (OA), and Supply-Processing- Distribution (SPD) systems, and capable of providing actionable, role-tuned insights to strengthen coordinated action across professional groups in public health operations.

We propose a five-pillar Intelligence-Readiness Framework and 22 design requirements outlining an incremental pathway from foundational interoperability and governance toward intelligence-ready infrastructure operations, to enhance organizational resilience and contribute to broader community preparedness in public health.