Efficacy and pitfalls of digital technologies in healthcare services: A systematic review of two decades

Abstract

The use of technology in the healthcare sector and its medical practices, from patient record maintenance to diagnostics, has significantly improved the health care emergency management system. At that backdrop, it is crucial to explore the role and challenges of these technologies in the healthcare sector. Therefore, this study provides a systematic review of the literature on technological developments in the healthcare sector and deduces its pros and cons. We curate the published studies from the Web of Science and Scopus databases by using PRISMA 2015 guidelines. After mining the data, we selected only 55 studies for the systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis. The study explores four significant classifications of technological development in healthcare: (a) digital technologies, (b) artificial intelligence, (c) blockchain, and (d) the Internet of Things. The novel contribution of current study indicate that digital technologies have significantly influenced the healthcare services such as the beginning of electronic health record, a new era of digital healthcare, while robotic surgeries and machine learning algorithms may replace practitioners as future technologies. However, a considerable number of studies have criticized these technologies in the health sector based on trust, security, privacy, and accuracy. The study suggests that future studies, on technological development in healthcare services, may take into account these issues for sustainable development of the healthcare sector.

Digital stressors and resources perceived by emergency physicians and associations to their digital stress perception, mental health, job satisfaction and work engagement

“…Barriers include the need for evidence-based evaluation, the risk of security breaches and misinformation, interoperability, physician resistance and concerns about data quality, privacy, and regulation [ 31 , 32 ]. Additionally, the technically-driven development of e-health and telemedicine, lack of common platforms and connectivity, and issues with privacy and data protection pose further challenges [ 33 ].…”

Health 4.0 in the medical sector: a narrative review

“…Recently, Akhtar et al 34 argued that new technologies have significantly influenced health services, with the beginning of the electronic medical record, a new era of digital health, and the emerging growth of techniques that aim to implement robotic surgeries and algorithms for machine learning, which can even replace the health professionals in the future. Additionally, Battineni, Hossain, and Chintalapudi 35 also pointed out that the information collected in "biobanks" may predict possible pathological outcomes based on AI, which will probably lead to precision medicine research and guide the population's health services.…”

Artificial intelligence and digital medicine for integrated home care services in Italy: Opportunities and limits

“…Digitization is one of the major drivers of innovation and may be the solution to meeting the challenge of sustainability in the healthcare sector ( 17 ). Connected Care ( 4 ) ( Figure 1 ) is gradually acquiring a strategic role in Italian digital healthcare, which puts the citizen-patient at the center of the system by creating organizational models that favor integrated care, between hospital and territory, to foster patient empowerment ( 18 ). This system includes new organizational models and technological solutions, in order to enable the sharing of patients' clinical information among all the actors involved in the treatment process (hospital doctors and nurses, local and home health workers, patients, insurers, institutional representatives, etc.…”