Towards Smart and Green Features of Cloud Computing in Healthcare Services: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Background: The healthcare sector has been facing multilateral challenges regarding the quality of services and access to healthcare innovations. As the population grows, the sector requires faster and more reliable services, but the opposite is true in developing countries. As a robust technology, cloud computing has numerous features and benefits that are still to be explored. The intervention of the latest technologies in healthcare is crucial to shifting toward next-generation healthcare systems. In developing countries like Ethiopia, cloud features are still far from being systematically explored to design smart and green healthcare services. Objective: To excavate contextualized research gaps in the existing studies towards smart and green features of cloud computing in healthcare information services. Methods: We conducted a systematic review of research publications indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, PubMed, and ProQuest. 52 research articles were screened based on significant selection criteria and systematically reviewed. Extensive efforts have been made to rigorously review recent, contemporary, and relevant research articles. Results: This study presented a summary of parameters, proposed solutions from the reviewed articles, and identified research gaps. These identified research gaps are related to security and privacy concerns, data repository standardization, data shareability, self-health data access control, service collaboration, energy efficiency/greenness, consolidation of health data repositories, carbon footprint, and performance evaluation. Conclusion: The paper consolidated research gaps from multiple research investigations into a single paper, allowing researchers to develop innovative solutions for improving healthcare services. Based on a rigorous analysis of the literature, the existing systems overlooked green computing features and were highly vulnerable to security violations. Several studies reveal that security and privacy threats have been seriously hampering the exponential growth of cloud computing. 54 percent of the reviewed articles focused on security and privacy concerns. Keywords: Cloud computing, Consolidation, Green computing, Green features, Healthcare services, Systematic literature review.