Professional Competence and Its Effect on the Implementation of Healthcare 4.0 Technologies: Scoping Review and Future Research Directions

Abey Jose (), Guilherme L. Tortorella, Roberto Vassolo, Maneesh Kumar and Alejandro Mac Cawley
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Abey Jose: Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago 7820000, Chile
Guilherme L. Tortorella: Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia
Roberto Vassolo: IAE Business School, Universidad Austral, Buenos Aires B1630FHB, Argentina
Maneesh Kumar: Logistics and Operations Management Section, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 20, issue 1, 1-22

Abstract: Background: The implementation of Healthcare 4.0 technologies faces a number of barriers that have been increasingly discussed in the literature. One of the barriers presented 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. This study aims to analyse the previous research related to the competence requirements when adopting Healthcare 4.0 technologies. Methods: To achieve our goal, we followed the standard procedure for scoping reviews. We performed a search in the most important databases and retrieved 4976 (2011–present) publications from all the databases. After removing duplicates and performing further screening processes, we ended up with 121 articles, from which 51 were selected following an in-depth analysis to compose the final publication portfolio. Results: Our results show that the competence requirements for adopting Healthcare 4.0 are widely discussed in non-clinical implementations of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) applications. Based on the 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. 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 requirements for competence to handle the technologies used for ‘processing’ and ‘actuation’ are not prevalent in the literature portfolio.

Keywords: Healthcare 4.0; scoping review; healthcare technology; competence; digital health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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