The Digital Evolution in healthcare: Mapping the Socio-Digital Determinants of Emerging Inequities

Continuous digital innovations are introducing profound changes in all aspects of people’s daily lives. The healthcare sector and the process of providing healthcare services are also facing the changes imposed by digital evolution. The introduction and application of ICT advances are enormous, such as electronic health records, high-definition images, digital reports or even wearable devices that allow constant and rapid monitoring of health data and in-formation. Academic literature has focused on the enormous advantages that technological diffusion and technological evolution have generated in the healthcare sector. At the same time, the introduction and use of these digital evolutions create new disparities and difficulties in accessing healthcare ser-vices. With these premises, the objective of this study is to understand how digital evolution and the introduction of new technologies contribute to the cre-ation of inequalities in the healthcare process. This study is based on a literature review. Two main scientific and international databases were used (a) SCOPUS and (b) Web of Knowledge (WoS). Scientific documents were extracted and re-trieved on April 10, 2025. Only peer-reviewed journal articles published in English were considered (books, book chapters/reviews, professional articles, conference proceedings, working papers, reports, unpublished works were not considered. Finally, 64 scientific documents are selected. The results confirm that digitalization in the healthcare sector is a central topic, which is character-ized by interdisciplinarity and, consequently, the use of different theoretical and methodological approaches. An interesting result is the absence of explicit keywords of “ethics” or “data privacy”. Future studies should focus on further exploring the relationships between ethics and data privacy or strategies to re-duce the digital divide in older populations.