Digitalization in Healthcare Industry: Is There a Nexus with the Population’s Life Expectancy?

Industry 4.0 contributes to the improvement of medical service quality and efficiency, which is critical for the growing needs of patients. Thanks to the integration of innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and big data analytics, medical institutions get an opportunity to optimize clinical processes, improve diagnosis and treatment, and provide a personalized approach to patients. These technologies promote early detection of diseases and improve management of chronic diseases, which is one of the factors that increase life expectancy. Thanks to digital health, healthcare systems become more adaptive and resilient to modern challenges, which improves the population’s quality of life. The paper tests the hypothesis about the influence of digital health determinants on the life expectancy of the world population. The statistical study basis is data characterizing levels of healthcare digitization for 31 countries in 2024. The conducted research showed that the life expectancy of citizens from different countries is closely related to medicine digitization. In particular, these are digitization indicators related to leadership and management, strategy and investment, legislation, involvement of relevant specialists, availability of standards for digital health information, medical information, availability of relevant infrastructure, and relevant services and programs. Principal component analysis (PCA) and Lasso regression made it possible to generate a model that describes relationships between life expectancy and levels of medical service digitalization. The obtained results confirm the existence of a close statistically significant relationship between these variables. It indicates a significant impact of digital technologies on improving medical care quality and population life expectancy.