Digital Technologies in Healthcare: A Systematic Review and Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Digital technologies hold great promise and have the ability to change healthcare and drug development by changing the way we collect, process, and visualize health data. The implementation of digital technologies in healthcare can make public healthcare more accessible and flexible. This includes patient’s treatment, complications, open data on health, latest biomedical research developments, among other things. Medical services and diagnostic tools are becoming more accessible and available, even in less developed economies. However numerous issues concerning digital health technologies, such as safety, testing, reliability, and ethical considerations, remain unresolved. The study aims to discuss and analyze the recent progress in the application of digital healthcare such as ICT, smart/wearable devices, artificial intelligence, big data, and telemedicine in healthcare. Scopus database was used for the publication search. We merged descriptive analysis and bibliometric analysis to determine the temporal evolution, most productive journals, top authors, most productive countries, and co-occurrence of keywords (to identify well-explored topics) in the available scientific literature concerning digital technology in the healthcare field. Using content analysis, we have determined the research hotspots of the scientific publications during the past five years.