Professional competence and their effect on the implementation of Healthcare 4.0 technologies: Scoping review and future research directions

ABEY JOSE ; TORTORELLA, GUILHERME; VASSOLO, R. S.; KUMAR, MANEESH; MAC CAWLEY VERGARA, ALEJANDRO

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND PUBLIC HEALTH

MOLECULAR DIVERSITY PRESERVATION INTERNATIONAL-MDPI

Lugar: Basel; Año: 2022

1660-4601

Background: The implementation of Healthcare 4.0 technologies and the barriers they face are increasingly discussed in the literature. When we dive deep into individual aspects, it explores different dimensions of each problem the stakeholders have practically experienced during implementation. One of the barriers is the lack of professionals trained in the required competencies. Such competencies can be technical, methodological, social, and personal, contributing to healthcare professionals managing and adapting to technological changes. Also, different learning processes can impact these individual competence’s development. However, a structured and holistic approach toanalyzing the competence requirement and learning needs while adopting Healthcare 4.0 technologies is not available in the literature. Objective: This study aims to analyse previous research related to the competence requirements and learning needs when adopting Healthcare 4.0 technologies. Through the literature review wee propose to construct a framework to analyse the competence requirements and learning process the adoption of I4.0 technologies in healthcare organisations. Concluding with future research directions. Methods: To achieve our goal, we followed the standard procedure for scoping reviews. We performed a search in the Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus, and databases with the keywords Hospital, Clinic, Nursing home, Health service, Care provider, Competence, Skills, Knowledge, Expertise, Literacy, Learn, Experience in the title, abstract, and keywords of research papers. We retrieved 4976 (2011 – present) publications from all the databases. After removing duplicates and performing further screening, we were left with 121 articles, from which 51 were selected after in-depth analysis to compose the final publication portfolio. Results: Our findings show that the competence requirements for adopting Healthcare 4.0 are widely discussed in non-clinical implementations of I4.0. Based on citation frequency and overall relevance score, the competence requirement for adopting applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) along with technical competence is a prominent contributor to the literature. The learning process is mainly associated with different training sessions provided for the professionals, and stakeholder participation is much needed to implement the technologies successfully.Conclusions: Healthcare organisations are in a technological transition stage and widely incorporate various technologies. Organisations seem to prioritise technologies for ‘Sensing’ and ‘Communication’ applications. The corpus of literature talks mainly about the requirement of technical competencies for non-clinical applications. Also, the requirement for competence to handle the technologies used for ‘Processing’ and ‘Actuation’ are not prevalent in the literature portfolio. Out of various learning aspects discussed in the literature, training sessions are the primary source of learning. We may need further studies to explore individual competence in each technology-specific application and organisational learning capabilities on competence development.