Enterprise Architecture in Healthcare Systems: A systematic literature review

TL;DR

This systematic literature review analyzes current enterprise architecture practices in healthcare systems, highlighting methodologies, tools, impacts, challenges, and success factors based on empirical studies.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive synthesis of EA application in healthcare, identifying key methodologies, tools, and success factors through a rigorous review of 46 studies.

Findings

Identified most used EA methodologies and tools in healthcare.

Highlighted positive impacts and challenges of EA in healthcare.

Mapped influential authors and publication channels in the field.

Abstract

Enterprise architecture (EA) has been present in scientific literature since the 1980s and has branched out into several research fields. EA delivers value by presenting business and ICT leaders with recommendations for adjusting policies and projects to achieve business goals. Although there are many works on the EA application in healthcare systems, the literature lacks studies that provide a systematic approach to this topic specifically. This work presents a deep and broad Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to select studies demonstrating current EA practices in healthcare systems. The researchers established an SLR protocol returning 280 primary studies after the first step of the Data Selection and a consolidated inclusion of 46 articles after the second step. They assessed the level of disagreement during the team's evaluations using Cohen's Kappa. This SLR revealed essential aspects of state-of-the-art EA application in healthcare systems, such as the most used methodologies and tools, best practices, and criteria considered for their choice. It also analyzed the main positive impacts, challenges, and critical success factors described by the studies' authors based on empirical approaches. Besides, this work brings the main publication channels and the most influential authors on the topic of EA in Healthcare systems.