Digital Health

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Digital health is an emerging field that implements technology within healthcare to provide a wide variety of services ranging from mobile health, health information technology, wearable devices, telehealth and telemedicine, and personalized medicine. Digital health technologies make use of computing platforms, software, and sensors to aid providers and stakeholders in numerous efforts including reducing costs and inefficiencies and improving access and quality of care through a personalized and precise approach to medicine.

Although digital health technologies enable inexpensive communication and have the potential to prevent disease, the COVID-19 pandemic has made inequities between social and minority groups apparent. Critics also warn of privacy and security concerns regarding personal health information, along with the possibility of misinterpretation of medical results by patients due to the impersonal element of digital health networks.

Technologies

Mobile Health

The introduction of the smartphones has revolutionized peoples lives in many ways, including how they seek medical information. Specifically, smartphones have led to a popularity in mHealth apps. These apps are health related applications that can serve a multitude of functions aimed at improving patients' health. The major app stores house over 165,000 apps that allow individuals to track their own health. These apps can provide “low cost, around-the-clock access” to health information to users, allowing them to stay informed on the best processes and techniques when navigating chronic disease management, mental health, and general health concerns.

Mobile health apps can be grouped into five categories.

• Wellness Management - Two-thirds of the mhealth apps in the app store are consumer-facing that aim to encourage a healthy lifestyle. These apps monitor individuals’s diet and physical activity by collecting data through smartphones or external devices like a heart rate monitor.
• Medication Reminders - For individuals struggling with medication compliance, these apps allow patients to enter in their medications, provide a calendar, and send notifications on when to take their prescriptions.
• Disease Management - individuals with chronic diseases like diabetes benefit from mhealth apps given it allows them to keep a symptom diary, enter food diary entries, and ensure compliance with their medications and physical activity.
• Seld-Diagnosis - Apps of this nature have become popular among consumers during emergencies as they provide a first step for patients to understand their symptoms and generate possible diagnosis.
• Patient Portals - These apps are created primarily by major electronic health companies and enable Patients to access parts of their medical records like laboratory results and serve as a reminder tool for appointments, vaccinations and more.

Wearable Technology

Wearable technology consists of a broad scope of devices including smartwatches. Smartwatches and other fitness tracking devices became prominent starting in 2014 as individuals wanted to track more than just weight loss. Popular fitness brands like Apple Watch and Fitbit are equipped with sensors on bands or patches that allow a user’s data to be logged throughout the day. These technologies allow consumers to self-monitor and regulate their own health practices without the need of a healthcare professions For instance, these wearable gadgets allow users to track advanced metrics like heart rate, body fat percentage, menstrual cycle, and more.. Growth within this area is largely contributed to the growth of the internet of things, a move towards connecting devices to the internet .

In addition to smartwatches, there is ongoing research focusing on associated energy solutions for implantable devices in a healthcare setting. Progress has been made in the study of nanomaterials as research shows that they can allow for seamless interaction with soft tissues and organs. Research also suggests that an advantage of soft, flexible wearable sensors is its capability of tracking physiological parameters such as cardiac activity. These sensors can monitor cardiovascular biomarkers such as hearth rate, blood pressure and more to mitigate incidences and mortality of cardiovascular disease. Monitoring biomarkers through wearable sensors can allow healthcare professionals to deliver personalized medicine to their patients by tailoring medications and therapeutics based on collected data.

Telemedicine

Telemedicine encompasses a large array of digital health services.

Remote and Digital Clinics

Remote clinics have emerged to provide individuals in remote, typically rural communities, with specialty medical services. In many of these areas, there is also a lack of specialty expertise making it a necessary decision to link health care centers.

Digital clinics include email consultations which can provide rapid communication for non-urgent concerns. Video consultation have emerged as well to save patients time, hospital resources, and to provide care for those who do not have easy access to healthcare.

Online Appointment Booking

Online appointment bookings allow for administrative efficiencies where staff sees a minimized number of missed appointments. The industry is Evolving to the technological changes through the use of smartphones to text alerts for appointments and confirmations. Services like ordering prescription refills online and booking clinical appointments have overall benefits like increasing patient outcome, reducing pharmaceutical risk and making the patient’s experience efficient.

Digital Doctor

Recently, there has been an information overload due to expansion of knowledge base and biomedical evidence. Doctors are focused on referrals, x-rays, blood test reports, etc during appointments which means staring at computer screens instead of having a conversation with the patient. This hinders the personable component to patient-doctor relationships, but the technology of the time allows for smart access to quality info, allowing for better care and advice from healthcare professionals.

The “E-Doctor” Era

Nowadays, healthcare professionals google medical information before seeing their patients; they have access to patients monitors that can be viewed on their devices at any time. Even hospitals have adopted a modern digital service where electronic health records are kept for each patient. In this digital age, e-prescriptions ensure speedy drug delivery and also keep doctors aware of a patient’s drug record changes.

Other

New digital health applications, like artificial intelligence, continue to enter the market as the industry is trying to adapt. Artificial intelligence can be tool used to assist imaging specialists like radiologists that could help minimize errors in interpretation of images leading to more accurate diagnoses. This technology can propel acceleration and automation using AI algorithms to increase productivity and save time for all stakeholders. Tasks that may have been completed manually before could now utilize AI to accelerate the processes.

Another technology assisting healthcare professionals is augmented reality. Augmented reality leverages 2D images and other patient data to then create a 3D model that can assist in understanding the anatomy of a patient’s body. These images help professionals like surgeons when planning surgical procedures, decreasing the chances of errors in the operating room. During an operation, surgeons and their teams must sort through a clutter of images and data which diverts their attention from the patient, increasing the chance of a error. Augmented reality technology allows for a higher level of precision when navigating the body to locate organs during an operation.

Recent Application: COVID-19

Over the course of history, digital health technologies have played an important role during pandemics. The impact on the public infrastructure caused by these health crises has made the need and development for digital technologies apparent. The current Covid-19 pandemic has challenged health systems in several ways making it critical to focus on early detection and treatment, surveillance and outbreak control. Healthcare providers have applied different services such as telemedicine, electronic health records and artificial intelligence to manage care and prevent and control the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, telemedicine has allowed for an exchange of information, while avoiding close contact to limit disease spread, reducing healthcare exposure, and streamlining decisions made in the first stage care of suspected COVID-19 patients. For instance, the COVID-19 information page has been a resourceful tool updated in real time, while providing readers with symptom information and instructions for quarantine processes. This service has even enabled patients to connect with healthcare providers for remote medical screenings and assessments in efforts to minimize frontline provider exposure. Additionally, with recent travel restrictions imposed, cloud based electronic health records have became critical in documenting recent history of travel to support efforts of contact tracing to control the spread of COVID-19 around the world.

The pandemic has also given rise to certain new digital health technologies like artificial intelligence that have assisted in predicting modeling and trends that can help in creating a framework for the epidemic response (article). This technology has been aiding epidemiology and infectious disease professionals develop control strategies along with facilitating an effective COVID-19 vaccine delivery system.