Digital Health Technologies in Patient Experience Literature: A Scoping Review and Future Outlook for Sustainable Digital Health Interventions

The aim of this study is to address the issues identified in previous reviews and meta-analyses regarding the progress of patient experience literature and to highlight the most important concepts specifically related to digital health technologies. To do so, we have carried out a comprehensive analysis of the literature on patient experience in the category of health science services databases over the past decade and identified the tools related to digital health technologies within these studies. This is a bibliometric study based on data obtained from the Web of Science and Scopus between the years 2014 to and 2024 by using 11 search terms. In this review, a total of 21,392 publications from patient experience literature over the last decade were analyzed. Keywords were grouped by showing their co-occurrence using bibliometric and scientific mapping analyzing methods. The development of digitalization and digital tools has contributed to the advancement of theory in the field of digital health, eHealth, electronic health records, health information technology, the internet, mhealth, mobile applications, mobile health, patient portals, smartphones, social media, telemonitoring, web, artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual reality, telehealth, telemedicine, telerehabilitation, and virtual care. These developments have provided sustainable digital health benefits in the development of patient experience theories. The findings of this study emphasize that digital health tools cover a wide area of research, and the application of information and communication technologies goes beyond the field of medicine and covers the broad field of healthcare.