Readiness in adopting digital healthcare strategies and policies: An Indian perspective

Abstract

The healthcare sector has seen tremendous transformation all over the world especially in the adoption of digital strategies. These strategies have proven to be the most effective vehicles to deliver quality and cost-effective healthcare at scale to large population. Many countries all over the world have adopted smart healthcare strategies to effectively reach quality healthcare services to their citizens. Indian Government is also actively rolling out the Ayushman Bharath Digital Mission (ABDM) which was officially announced in the last quarter of 2021. As this ambitious flagship programme of the Indian government makes steady progress, it is very important to assess and evaluate the factors determining readiness in successfully adopting such a large-scale smart healthcare programme. Preparedness of all the stakeholders to successfully embrace such a change is important. Although smart healthcare strategies are the best vehicles to deliver quality healthcare at scale, all such implementations are not necessarily successful and a large number of them end in failure. The objective of this research is to systematically examine published literature to identify and enumerate a list of readiness factors across the healthcare ecosystem in a digital transformation mission. Critical knowledge and assessment based on these readiness factors is important to the success of the ABDM programme. PubMed, Scopus, EBSCOHost, Science Direct and Open Access databases were systematically searched for full text, peer reviewed, English articles that have listed such readiness factors in the adoption of smart healthcare. The ABDM portal and its document store have additionally been used as a source of material and for analyses, especially since the primary scope of this study was in India. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines were used to select eligible articles. After the full screening, 17 articles that met the criteria were analysed and used to identify six key factors and areas of readiness across the healthcare ecosystem for adopting smart healthcare strategies. These will enable the policy makers and the other stakeholders to understand and evaluate the readiness in the different areas of the ecosystem and accordingly strategies could be deployed. It is concluded that the success of ABDM is dependent on its adoption by public sector, private sector, end users and healthcare sector decision makers. Future research is needed to enable institutionalising a framework to ensure readiness and in measuring the readiness against each of the identified areas/factors across the ecosystem. Measure of readiness is an important indicator to successful adoption.