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Abstract: Healthcare is of high importance in any country and today this industry has been undergoing a profound change, being reshaped by the adoption of digital transformations (DT), a trend accelerated during the pandemic, where social distancing have forced providers to employ new technologies with enormous potential to improve overall health systems. Considering that healthcare is a highly regulated sector, and that the current literature is incipient regarding the adoption of strategic processes, we conducted a systematic review to analyze the evolution of digital transformation in healthcare with focus on four parameters and approaches: applications, benefits, opportunities, and threats, impacting this market.
Our study is based on a list of seventy-seven peer-reviewed articles from Scopus database, between 2015 and 2022. We expect that our study advances the understanding of the development of technical innovations in the healthcare ecosystem and supports scholars and practitioners to further explore its empirical effectiveness in healthcare.
Keywords: Healthcare; Systematic Literature Review; Industry 4.0; Digital Transformation; Artificial Intelligence
1 Introduction
Healthcare is of high importance in any country, responsible for its overall development and growth. Considered by Shukla, Agarwal, & Shekhar (2021) the "basic fabric in the human society" (p. 1), it improves and maintains every population's health by diagnosing, treating and preventing injuries and illnesses, both physical or mental, delivered by health service providers through the work of physicians, nurses, support staff, hospital systems, emergencies, etc.
Today healthcare has been undergoing a profound change in the age of industry 4.0, with the development of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and the increasing computational power and the design of efficient algorithms (Davenport & Kalakota, 2019; Piccialli et al., 2021). Schwab (2016) argued that healthcare systems are being reshaped, in a movement that revises conventional management and organizational practices, requiring the adoption of new perspectives for the future of health services' design and delivery, with potential of improvements globally (Ciasullo et al., 2021; Hospodkova et al., 2021). This trend has been accelerated during the pandemic, where social distancing measures have forced providers to employ virtual care technology for outpatient appointments, leading hospitals and health systems to turn to cloud computing, 5G telecommunications, and interoperable data and analytics to build digitally powered care delivery models to improve access, support...