Communication and Its Impact on Patient Experience as a Cornerstone of the Digitalisation of Healthcare Business Processes: A Scoping Review

Digital transformation (DT) has become increasingly prominent the healthcare scene, incorporating digital innovations into all healthcare processes in a new eHealth 4.0 model. In this paradigm, communication becomes a key process for making decisions and strengthening links with healthcare stakeholders. This study aims to explore the nature of scientific production and the relevance that academia assigns to both communication processes and the impact of DT on patient (user) experience in healthcare contexts. To this end, a scoping review of the scientific literature was conducted in Scopus using the PRISMA-ScR protocol, resulting in 163 records published between 2015 and October 2025, which were subsequently analysed with VOSviewer (version 1.6.20) to explore the results, enabling a bibliometric and thematic exploration of the most influential publications. The findings reveal a growing body of scientific output, with special emphasis on the organisational transformation derived from technological innovations, which contrasts with the limited interest of academia in communication approaches and in patient experience, as well as in the way trust and satisfaction are reconfiguring the relationships among the actors in the system. These results suggest the need to redesign business processes from a more human and empathetic perspective, linked in terms of equity to the 2030 Agenda, and to promote policies fostering digital, media and health literacy.