Consumer adoption of digital health services: A systematic literature review and research agenda

Abstract

Digital health services (DHSs) have revolutionized the healthcare sector to provide quality care facilities that are affordable, efficient, and universally accessible. By making patients the focus of the healthcare delivery process, these services can offer more personalized and effective health solutions and thus facilitate a more robust and resilient health ecosystem. The adoption of these services increased manifold during the COVID-19 pandemic and gained immense attention from researchers across the globe. Despite this, there is limited knowledge about the facets of DHS adoption from the consumers' perspective. Thus, it is imperative to synthesize the extant literature to provide a holistic view of DHS adoption. This article offers an organized, retrospective view of the DHS literature, using a framework-based systematic review approach to identify factors contributing to DHS adoption from the consumers' perspective. To do this, 63 articles from the Web of Science database over the last 23 years were systematically reviewed using two well-known organising frameworks. The Antecedents-Decisions-Outcomes framework uncovers the known associations of constructs in the DHS literature. Followed by the theories-contexts-methods framework that offers information on the theoretical, contextual, and methodological approaches applied in the DHS research. Additionally, the article identifies the major gaps in the existing body of literature and offers a few recommendations for future investigation for researchers and practitioners in the fields of consumer behaviour, technology, and health management. The global perspective of this review has multiple ramifications that can foster a more sustainable healthcare system by giving insight into consumers' perspectives.