Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Feb 28, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 28, 2022 - Apr 25, 2022
Date Accepted: Oct 14, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
What About the Management Perspective? – A Systematic Review of Digital Health Literature
ABSTRACT
Background:
New digital health technologies are considered one solution to challenges in the health sector, which include rising numbers of chronic diseases and increased health spending. As digitalization in healthcare is still in its infancy, there are many unanswered questions about the impact of digital health on management.
Objective:
This paper assesses the current state of knowledge in the field of digital health from a management perspective. It highlights research gaps within this field to determine future research opportunities.
Methods:
A systematic review of digital health literature was conducted using three databases. The chosen articles (n=38) were classified according to a taxonomy developed for the purpose and research gaps were identified based on the topic areas discussed.
Results:
The literature review revealed a slight prevalence of practical (55%) over theoretical (45%) approaches. Most of the papers (61%) deal with information technology (IT) and are, therefore, focused more on technology and less on management. Most of them (82%) have a research question dealing with the creation of concepts; very few (11%) evaluate or even question existing solutions. Most consider the main reason for digitalization to be the optimization of operational processes (68%); 42% deal with new business models. The topic area discussed most frequently was found to be eHealth (79%). By contrast, the field of tech health with topics such as sensors receives the least attention (8%), despite its significant potential for healthcare processes and strategy.
Conclusions:
Three main research propositions were identified. First, research into digital health should focus less on the technology and more on the implications it has for management. Second, the research community should target other domains besides eHealth. Third, we observed a lack of quantitative research on the real impact of digital health on organizations and their management.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.