Digital Transformation in Health Care: Are We on the Right Track?

Health care digital transformation is gaining increasing attention, despite the observed challenges in its implementation. The envisioned benefits, together with the growing need for better health care, are motivating academia, organizations, regulatory agencies, and governments to develop more effective digital health care solutions. Through extensive debates among the authors, this paper discusses how digital transformation is being conducted in the health care sector. Our discussion relies on concepts from sociotechnical systems theory, categorizing it into 3 social (people, culture, and goals) and 3 technical (processes/procedures, infrastructure, and technology) dimensions. Drawing on both the literature discussed in this paper and our combined academic and practical experience-each author contributing over a decade of work in health care digital transformation-we examined current digitalization efforts from a sociotechnical standpoint. Overall, we argue that both social and technical dimensions present elements that have either encouraged or discouraged the progress of health care digital transformation. The identification of current trends on such (on- and off-track) elements allowed the formulation of 12 propositions across each sociotechnical dimension for future testing and validation. This approach can help establish better government policies, foster private initiatives, and shift regulatory guidelines to support a successful digital transformation in health systems. Finally, from a research perspective, we outline some opportunities for further interdisciplinary investigation in the field, promoting advances in the understanding of health care digital transformation.