Abstract
The healthcare sector has seen tremendous transformation all over the world especially in the adoption of digital strategies. These strategies have proven to be the most effective vehicles to deliver quality and cost-effective healthcare at scale to large population. Many countries all over the world have adopted smart healthcare strategies to effectively reach quality healthcare services to their citizens. Indian Government is also actively rolling out the Ayushman Bharath Digital Mission (ABDM) which was officially announced in the last quarter of 2021. It aims to develop the backbone necessary to support the integrated digital health infrastructure of the country. Over a year since its inception, this mission has already made considerable progress and has reached millions of citizens in different ways. The ABDM’s ecosystem is complex, comprehensive and brings together all the different players and stakeholders starting from the public sector organisations to healthcare providers, insurance firms, third sector, diagnostic labs and healthcare service users. As this ambitious flagship programme of the Indian government makes steady progress, it is very important to assess and evaluate the factors determining readiness in successfully adopting such a large scale smart healthcare programme. Preparedness of all the stakeholders to successfully embrace such as change is important. Although smart healthcare strategies are the best vehicles to deliver quality healthcare at scale, all such implementations are not necessarily successful and a large number of them end in failure. The objective of this research is to systematically examine published literature to identify and enumerate a list of readiness factors across the healthcare ecosystem in a digital transformation mission. Critical knowledge and assessment based on these readiness factors is important to the success of the ABDM programme. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines were used to select eligible articles. After the full screening, 17 articles that met the criteria were analysed and used to identify six key factors and areas of readiness across the healthcare ecosystem for adopting smart healthcare strategies. These will enable the policy makers and the other stakeholders to understand and evaluate the readiness in the different areas of the ecosystem and accordingly strategies could be deployed. It is conclude that the success of ABDM is dependent on its adoption by public sector, private sector, end users and healthcare sector decision makers. Future research is needed to enable institutionalising a framework to ensure readiness and in measuring the readiness.