Abstract:

With the development of digital technologies in healthcare, the role of the patient in healthcare changes, since the transformation of the healthcare industry is not only the introduction of the new technologies, but also new ways of thinking and cooperation between the patient and the healthcare provider. This means that even now it is important to pay attention to the healthcare providers’ level of digital competencies.

Existing and future healthcare professionals will need to take on an important role of helping patients to develop their digital skills, so that they could learn how to efficiently use digital health platforms. The aim of this scoping review is to find out the factors that affect digital skills in existing and future healthcare professionals.

A scoping review was conducted using the methodological framework of Arksey and O’Malley. The reporting was guided by the PRISMA extension for Scoping Reviews.

The results demonstrate that the factors that affect healthcare students and professionals are many, including age, work experience, professional qualifications, attitude towards information technologies, lack of organization support, as well as personal innovativeness and technostress.

The development of digital competences in an individual not only depends on their technological skills and knowledge, but also on their personal attitude, capacity and competences, including being goal driven, having time management skills and acquired learning strategies.

To evaluate and develop digital competencies in healthcare studies, it is important to fortify its role in healthcare education, since it is one of the cross-cutting competencies, which needs to be promoted in all study programs and all healthcare education levels

Keywords:

Digital competence, healthcare, healthcare professionals, students.