Towards smart sterile supply cycles

The sterile supply cycle (SSC) is fundamental to perioperative care but remains fragmented and largely operated as an open-loop process in which deviations are often detected only in the operating room (OR). Current smart hospital concepts mainly address patient-centred systems and insufficiently integrate perioperative material logistics and sterile supply processes. This work proposes a conceptual framework for integrating ORs, OR management, and the SSC into a unified smart hospital network in order to enable end-to-end visibility and data-driven coordination.

A staged, model-driven approach was applied, combining preliminary empirical studies with principles from industrial smart manufacturing. An online survey and benchmarking data identified recurring systemic weaknesses, including missing or defective instruments and weak OR-CSSD information coupling. These findings were translated into functional, technical, and architectural requirements, which were iteratively refined through expert discussions.

The resulting framework adopts a service-oriented, layered architecture comprising perception, network, gateway, knowledge, and application layers. It represents ORs, OR management, and the CSSD as interoperable but autonomous subsystems and outlines an event-driven integration logic for cross-domain data exchange, traceability, and future decision support.

This work presents a conceptual integration framework for embedding the SSC within broader smart hospital architectures. By making sterile supply processes visible as an interoperable subsystem and by structuring cross-domain information flows, it provides a foundation for future prototyping and evaluation of more coordinated and resilient sterile supply processes.