The role of digital transformation in improving the efficacy of healthcare: A systematic review

Abstract

Healthcare is of high importance, and today it has been undergoing a profound change and being reshaped due to the adoption of digital transformations (DT). Nevertheless, considering the quick evolution of these technologies and its massive adoption, the current literature is still incipient on how innovations are translated into practice, with limited empirical evidence of its effectiveness, problems, and applications in digital healthcare. In fact, despite a considerably growing body of research literature on the use of new technologies in healthcare there is no systematic analysis on the practice of DT in healthcare systems. We believe that a literature review to fill this gap is important and pertinent, especially through the lens of applications, benefits, opportunities, and threats to analyze the status of these implementations and its impact in healthcare systems. We chose to perform a systematic literature review because it is a methodology that reviews previous literature and bring the field together, with rigor, concision, and minimal room for subjectivity, offering transparency in data collection and results with a higher level of objectivity and reproducibility. We expect to advance the understanding of the development of technical innovations in healthcare ecosystem and support scholars and practitioners to further explore empirical evidence of the effectiveness of digital applications in healthcare. We also offer a research agenda based on a bibliographic coupling analysis that identifies theoretical trends in the field researched and indicated four clusters with the most relevant themes of literature: IoT and Cloud computing, Data security, Healthcare structure, and Blockchain.