Digital Technologies on Health Services: A Systemic Review

Background

Individualised healthcare is now a reality thanks to the integration of technological advances in the healthcare sector (Alloghani et al., 2018); innovation is occurring on a scale that has never been seen before, especially in the digital sphere. The potential for using digital technologies to improve and promote population health is the integral focus of the world health organization (WHO) in its strategy to accelerate the global attainment of health services at an optimal scale (Electronic health records: manual for developing countries, 2006; Jebril, 2020). Aside from this, the use of digital technologies in health services has become universal standard (Dhingra and Dabas, 2020), and there has never been a time when the global population was more connected. The digitisation of health services has had and will continue to have a significant impact on healthcare provisioning. In this perspective, it is critical to evaluate the effects of such digital health services, just as it is with traditional services (Etkind et al., 2017). Decisions about whether to embrace, use, or fund new initiatives should ideally be informed by data on how well they contribute to health system objectives at all levels of the spectrum. Decisions-making may not be limited to government institutions, individuals, communities, and organisations, but the sole goal should be to advance and implement digital health initiatives for the benefit of all. The authors recognise the potential value of collaboration in making progress relevant, secure, affordable, transparent, and attainable. As such, digital technology innovators can be valuable strategic partners for invested stakeholders. In this regard, they must strive to pursue intentions that are sufficiently aligned, sustained, and demonstrated to go beyond the initial rush of adopting new technologies. To this end, ethical implementation, accountability, financial engagements, research, and evaluation of digital health outcomes are a minimum prerequisite of variables to be considered (Doshi et al., 2023).