Opportunities and Challenges of Introducing Digital Health Training in Medical and Health Sciences Education in Palestine

Introduction

Over the past decade, there has been an unprecedented increase in the adoption of hospital information systems (HIS) and electronic health records (EHRs) systems worldwide. By using HIS systems, hospitals can manage internal and external operational aspects, patient data, and financial transactions related to patient encounters. EHRs, on the other hand, are the digital patient record, where all patient-level information, from demographics to diagnostic procedures and prescribed interventions, is recorded, similar to paper records (Birkhead et al., 2015). For example, in the United States alone, since 2015, more than 80% of medical facilities have adopted EHR systems (Henry et al., 2016). Recently, the increased adoption of digital health platforms such as EHR systems is spreading in low-middle-income countries (LMIC) (Syzdykova et al., 2017), like Palestine, where the national EHR system was first implemented in 2010. The increased adoption of EHRs and HIS systems presents a great opportunity for data-driven healthcare (Sun et al., 2012), clinical research (Cowie et al., 2017) and even machine learning for diagnostic and prognostic applications (Cowie et al., 2017, Kim et al., 2019), especially for understudied populations such as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries, and Palestine specifically. Another area of health digitization that received significant attention from clinical practitioners during the pandemic is telemedicine (Portnoy et al., 2020).

With the spread of access to the internet and smartphones in rural areas, telemedicine offers great opportunities where patients get access to professional health services and communicate with their doctors without the need to travel, making healthcare more accessible for many low-income communities (Barbosa et al., 2021). Notwithstanding the promise of digital health technologies, most medical and health sciences educational curricula do not include digital health courses (Car et al., 2021), especially in Palestine. With no formal digital health training in health sciences education curricula, the utilization of new digital technologies remains suboptimal, limiting the financial benefits of medical providers, increasing the burden on health practitioners, and compromising patient experience and outcomes (Waseh et al., 2019). Despite the relatively young age of medical degree-granting universities in Palestine, there is a growing number of medical and health professionals (Kerr Winter et al., 2015). In 2021 alone, there are about 5000+ new health sciences graduates from various Palestinian universities and colleges, where specialities ranged from medicine to pharmacy, nursing and medical laboratory technology, yet available jobs remain limited. Introducing digital health training could open doors for new job opportunities on local, regional, and international levels for many health professionals. To this end, in this chapter, the aim is to analyze the current medical education curricula in Palestine and evaluate the opportunities and challenges in introducing digital health training in various health sciences specialities. While this chapter focuses on Palestine, many of the findings and challenges are relevant to neighbouring MENA countries, where there are similar financial and cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, studying the job prospects and career directions of healthcare can inform and highlight useful insights for building a strong education system across various levels in the MENA region.

The chapter is arranged as follows. We begin by introducing the background on the emergence of health informatics and digital health in Section 2, followed by a literature review on the existing studies investigating the higher education particularly, health majors in Palestine in Section 3. Section 4 presents the methodology followed in the paper for reviewing the curricula and choosing the digital health education areas. The rest of the paper discusses the current medical health sciences curricula in Palestine in light of the areas of digital health education. Finally, we conclude by summarising the major findings and evaluating the job opportunities and future outlook.