Digital health competencies and affecting factors among healthcare professionals: additional findings from a systematic review

Abstract

Introduction:

In recent decades, nurses’ and healthcare professionals’ digital health competencies have emerged as key factors in enabling the digital healthcare transformation. Therefore, this review aims to describe the level of digital health competencies among nurses and healthcare professionals and the factors affecting them.

Methods:

We performed an additional analysis of a database populated in our original systematic review by identifying the data set, evaluating its appropriateness to the research questions, and performing the data analysis. Four areas of digital health competencies among nurses and healthcare professionals emerged: ‘self-rated competencies’, ‘psychological and emotional aspects toward the use of digital technologies’, ‘knowledge about digital technologies’ and ‘use of digital technologies’. Item scores and affecting factors have been extracted and classified into poor, moderate and good levels of digital health competencies; factors have been categorised and then summarised.

Results:

‘Use of digital technologies’ was the area with the highest prevalence of poor-level scores, whereas the ‘knowledge about digital technologies’ had a good level of competence. Across categories, most of the items’ scores reflected a moderate level of competence. The main factors affecting digital health competencies in nursing were being younger, more educated, having positive collegial nurse–physician relationships and participating in hospital business.

Discussion:

Digital health competence might be further improved. Educators, policymakers and nurse managers should develop educational nursing programmes and opportunities by acting on the modifiable factors to develop digital health competencies.