6. CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSIONS
Digitalization of healthcare services in Turkiye is in line with the global digitalization trend. For digitalization transformation, significant investments are necessary both in private and public  organizations. The benefits of digitalization are valued by healthcare professionals. Digitalization of healthcare offer many advantages to healthcare professionals, patients and healthcare delivery. The major threat to digitalization of healthcare iscyber-attacks resulting in loss of patient medical records or use of patient data for different purposes. Among all the digitalization of healthcare services, the closed-loop medicine delivery system is the most important digitalization step to track medicines from their arrival in pharmacy and their delivery  to patients without any human error.
Telemedicine is mostly used in private hospitals and the use of telemedicine has been increased since Covid-19 pandemic and its use is more likely to continue to increase for patients who have transportation issues, health problems or do not want to go to hospitals because of a chance of contracting infection. With the new legislation the use of telemedicine is expected to expand into other fields.
The use of artificial intelligence is limited to a few areas. AI is currently used in the field of radiology because it can make the diagnosis quicker. However, the use of AI in other areas is expected to increase.
Similar to our findings other studies indicate that digital hospital applications increase the quality of information exchange both within healthcare professionals and between the hospital and patients.24,25 It will make possible to perform statistical data analysis of the data collected in the common access areas of all healthcare institutions.26 Quick access to the data registered in the system without time and place restrictions allow healthcare professionals and all other employees to make quick decisions in emergency situations.27 As parallel to our findings, the article written by Peker, et al show that digital healthcare services provide several benefits to healthcare professionals, managers and patients, but they carry several important disadvantages that should not be ignored and improved. For example, situations such as application problems related to software and hardware systems of Health Information Systems, lack of education and orientation of users, lack of information about information security, negative attitudes towards applications, adaptation to technology could cause problems in all areas where health professionals can benefit.28
According to our findings, the use of telemedicine services in public settings in Turkiye is very rare due to the patient load of physicians on a daily basis and patient preference. Only private hospitals in Turkiye are widely offering telemedicine services in many fields but not yet in ophthalmology or wound care or cardiology. However, telemedicine is used in most medical specialties such as cardiology, chronic wound care, dermatology, ophthalmology, and trauma care effectively in developed countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia, UK, Germany, and the Netherlands.30,31,32 While almost all health insurance companies, including state-sponsored health insurance companies (Medicare, Medicaid), encourage the use of telemedicine33 in the USA. Our findings reveal that the Turkish Ministry of Health very recently announced the legislation about the use of telemedicine on February 10,2022. In the past years the private health insurance companies have been working on how to revise the policies. For example, Ege University Medical Faculty Hospital provides healthcare services for patients with chronic diseases due to the COVID-19 epidemic. To be able to continue without serious disruptions, the “Telemedicine Polyclinic System” application has been used to provide the treatment of patients who applied to hospital polyclinics.34 
In summary, the widely use of telemedicine services in public hospitals might take some time in Turkiye due to patient preference for face-to-face interactions with healthcare professionals and infrastructure of telemedicine applications.