What are Digital Health and Technologies? Products, Objectives, Benefits and Challenges of using Digital Health Technologies

What is Digital Health, Digital Healthcare, Digital Health Benefits, Digital Health Products, Digital Health and Wellness, Digital Health Technology, Mobile Health and Wearable Technologies, Telemedicine and Telehealth Technologies 

What are Digital Health and Technologies?

Digital technologies are now integral part of our daily life, and the world’s population has never been more interconnected with the technologies. Digital health refers to the use of information and communications technologies in medicine and other health professions to diagnose (like blood pressure), treat, manage illnesses (like diabetes) and health risks and to promote wellness (like mental wellbeing). The broad scope of digital health includes categories such as mobile health, health information technology, wearable devices such as watch, telehealth and telemedicine, and personalized medicine.

Mobile Health and Wearable Technologies

These applications help in the sharing of health information through mobile technologies and wearable devices to healthcare providers and researchers. These technologies utilize wearable technologies and mobile applications such as fitness bands, smartwatches, etc., to track and monitor various vital and health parameters such as heart rate, blood sugar, blood pressure, and sleep quality.

Telemedicine and Telehealth Technologies

Telemedicine uses telecommunication and electronic information technologies to offer services to patients in remote and distant locations. For example, a remote patient’s can share health reports with a doctor. The doctor and patient can interact via audio-visual communication platform, and the doctor’s prescription is shared to the patient in almost real-time.  
 
Telehealth is telemedicine as well as it includes non-clinical services. Additionally, it provides clinical services to the patients, provide health education to patients and healthcare professionals, and maintain the administration of public health.

 

Objectives of Digital Health Products and Services

World Health Organization (WHO) has 3 key objectives to promote the implementation and scale-up of digital health and innovation:

 
·         Promoting data sharing and supporting implementation of digital solutions that contributes to informed decision making
·         Enhancing knowledge through scientific communities of practice
·         Systematically assessing and fulfilling supply of innovations

Digital health tools have the vast potential to advance healthcare professional’s ability to accurately diagnose and treat disease and enhance the delivery of health care for the individual especially in remote area and lower populated region. Mobile medical apps and software via artificial intelligence and machine learning, digital technology has been driving a revolution in health care.

 

The main objectives of digital health products and services are to improve: 

·         Patient health

·         Patient experience

·         Healthcare professional, physician, nurses and other healthcare provider experience

·         Lower the cost of healthcare

·         Access to healthcare the quality of outcomes of care and service provided to the patients

·         Quality of life of patients

·         Reduce any inefficiencies in the healthcare system

·         Provide more personalized health care for patients

Digital Health Products and Services

There are a lot of digital health Products and Services available to patients and public. Some of the main subcategories:

     ·         Telemedicine and health information
·         Remote sensing and wearables
·         Digitized health record platforms
·         Data analytics and intelligence, predictive modeling
·         Health and wellness behavior modification tools
·         Bioinformatics tools
·         Medical social media
·         Patient -physician-patient portals
·         Imaging

Refer FDA website for more information on What is Digital Health?

What Are the Benefits of Digital Health Technologies?

There are several benefits of Digital Health Technologies. Healthcare providers and stakeholders use digital health technologies in their efforts to:
·         Reduce inefficiencies in the process
·         Improve access to resources
·         Reduce costs
·         Increase quality
·         Make medicine more personalized for patients.

 

Patients and consumers can make use of digital health technologies to better handle and track their medical health and wellness-related activities. 

Usefulness of Digital Health Products and Services

Digital health technologies use sensors, computing programmes, data connectivity, software, and for health care tracking and related uses. These technologies cover a wide range of uses such as tools in general wellness and applications as a medical device. They may also be used as innovative techniques to develop or study new medical products for unmet medical need.

     ·         Disease Management
·         Public Health 
·         Diagnosis
·         Treatment
·         Stress management
·         General well being
·         Prevention and Wellness
·         Prognosis
·         Rehabilitation
·         Behavioral Health
·         Quality of life improvement 

Challenges of Using Digital Healthcare

Though digital healthcare system is the need of today’s time there are some challenges associated with it. The following problems make healthcare service providers reluctance in and keep them from digitalizing their systems.    

·         Data quality and security

·         Reluctance to change

·         Low digital expertise

·         Cost of transition

·         Government policies

Digital Health Jobs

Some of the most sought after jobs in the digital health care field include:
·         Software engineers
·         Web developers
·         Data scientists
·         Product engineers
·         Biomedical engineers

Summary

There are evidences that showed that the use of digital medicine allows patients to better track their own health and wellbeing. For example, the use of digital devices like the smart phones and smart watches not only helps with communication, but these devices now have a huge number of apps that can help monitor blood pressure, record blood sugars, heart rate, blood oxygen, medicine reminder to ensure compliance with medications, and track the amount of physical activity.

Read more about Digital Health on World Health Organization (WHO) website.

Reference

1.  Digital health - World Health Organization (WHO). https://www.who.int/health-topics/digital-health#tab=tab_1.

2. Digital Health Center of Excellence. Accessed online from https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/digital-health-center-excellence.

3.    Ronquillo Y, Meyers A, Korvek SJ. Digital Health. [Updated 2022 May 8]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2022 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470260/.