Impact assessment of digital ecosystem in healthcare services: A qualitative case study of hospital data management in Bikaner District in India

Abstract

The proliferation of digitalization, along with advanced computational techniques, in the healthcare ecosystem has expedited the process of patient care, treatment, and disease diagnosis globally. Medical research, especially involving computational techniques, is heavily dependent on the availability of high-quality datasets generated at the point of care for effective translational research. Our study aims to understand the state of the digital ecosystem (i.e., digitalization, usage of electronic health records (EHRs), and medical data) for the purpose of improving healthcare services and research in hospitals. We conducted a questionnaire-based survey at 16 upper-primary health care centers and public hospitals in the district of Bikaner, Rajasthan, India, to understand the current practices of medical data digitalization and data repository development. The survey results have been analyzed using Principal Component Factor Analysis (PCFA) and statistical tests, including Cronbach’s Alpha, the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure, and Bartlett’s test of sampling adequacy, which indicate that the state of digitalization is in its initial phase. Among technical professionals, 35.6% agreed that digitalization has been implemented, while 12.3% remained neutral and 52.1% disagreed. For the same, 41.4% agreed, 13.0% remained neutral, and 45.6% disagreed among non-technical professionals. These highlight that almost half of the groups recognize slow progress in this area, implying that digitalization is still in its initial phase. Our study also indicates that the lack of access to structured and semi-structured medical datasets is a key barrier to applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in Indian healthcare research, where these technologies could play a crucial role in improving healthcare diagnostics, outcome prediction, enhancing clinical decision-making, etc., for better healthcare services, esp. in resource-constrained settings.

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