Implementing digital cancer diagnostic innovation in healthcare : A qualitative study of barriers and facilitators

Digital technology has greatly revolutionized the field of health care and medical practices. Digitalization has significantly excelled the operational efficiency and standards of medical care enhancing the overall experience for both medical professionals and patients. Despite its overwhelming advantages, Health care sectors have been lagging in adopting and implementing new digital technology innovations. Deciding and shifting towards digitalization would require adopters to have a flexible and open mindset. However, health care has a great shortage of pathologists, and implementation of digitalization seems to be very limited in this area of healthcare. Most of the pathologists today work with manual cancer diagnosing techniques indicating an acute need for digitalization. This thesis is aimed at identifying the barriers and facilitators for the implementation of a digital prostate cancer diagnostic innovation in health care. A literature review provides a detailed outline of various aspects related to prostate cancer diagnosis. It provides a detailed description of different frameworks and theories in relation to existing barriers and facilitators in implementing innovation in health care. The methodological approaches applied in this study have also been described in the methodology chapter. Based on the data gathered from semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis, three main themes were identified, and corresponding to these, possible barriers, and facilitators for implementing the digital cancer diagnostic innovation were developed. Finally, the findings of this study concluded that implementation of digital cancer diagnostic innovation faces several barriers and facilitators. Some of the crucial barriers are financial barriers, time constraints, political conflicts, ethical policies, technology limitations, limited knowledge, skepticism towards new technology. Similarly, facilitators are Identifying key decision-makers, highly effective and cost-efficient technologies, high technical accuracy, openness in trying new technology