Digital health, or digital healthcare, is a broad, interdisciplinary concept that includes concepts from the intersection of technology and healthcare. Digital health applies digital transformation to the healthcare sector, incorporating software, hardware, and services. Digital health includes mobile health (mHealth) apps, electronic health records (EHRs), electronic medical records (EMRs), wearable devices, telehealth, telemedicine, and personalized medicine.
Stakeholders in the digital health field include patients, physicians, researchers, application developers, and medical device manufacturers and distributors. Digital healthcare plays an increasingly important role in today’s healthcare.
Terms related to digital health include health information technology (health IT), medical tools, medical analytics, health informatics, hospital IT, and medical technology.
What is digital health as we know it today?
The idea of applying information and communications technologies to deliver digital health interventions to prevent disease and improve quality of life is not new, but in the face of global concerns such as an aging population, childhood illness and mortality, epidemics and pandemics, high costs, and the impact of poverty and racism on access to healthcare, digital health platforms, healthcare systems, and related technologies are growing in importance and continue to evolve.
Government health insurance programs such as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in the United States have also led to new developments in digital health. Although there were technical challenges when the ACA was first launched, its goals included improving the quality of healthcare through technology. For example, this included improving the quality of EHRs and computer modeling used to track healthcare costs. Using technology and data to improve patient health and quality of healthcare is called health informatics. It helps healthcare professionals evaluate new programs, look for areas of improvement within the healthcare sector, and integrate new technologies into healthcare.
The COVID-19 pandemic has added fuel to the fires of change and further accelerated the ongoing digital transformation in healthcare. According to Forrester Research, the most impactful COVID-19 technologies include patient-facing tools such as online symptom checkers, patient portals, remote patient monitoring tools, and telehealth.
Why is digital health important?
According to Deloitte Insights, digital health is not just about technology and tools, but “radical interoperable data, artificial intelligence (AI) and open, secure platforms will play a central role in enabling more consumer-centric, prevention-oriented care.”
Advances in AI, big data, robotics and machine learning continue to drive significant change in digital healthcare, and the changing digital healthcare landscape is driving the development of ingestible sensors, robotic caregivers and devices and apps for remotely monitoring patients.
According to Deloitte, “AI will enable major scientific advances, accelerating the development of new treatments and vaccines to fight disease. AI-enabled digital therapeutics and personalized recommendations will help consumers prevent the onset of health problems. AI-generated insights will influence diagnostic and treatment choices, leading to safer and more effective care. Additionally, intelligent manufacturing and supply chain solutions will ensure the right treatments and interventions are delivered at the precise time patients need them.”
Precedence Research predicts that the global digital health market will reach $833.44 billion from 2020 to 2027, registering a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.9%. According to the Ottawa-based market research firm, the rapid increase in the number of healthcare apps is driving this growth. North America holds a major share of the global digital health market due to a growing elderly population, high smartphone penetration, and the drive to develop apps and digital healthcare platforms to reduce healthcare costs.
Digital Health Technology Examples
Digital health innovations are designed to save time, increase accuracy and efficiency, and combine technology in new ways in healthcare. These innovations can blend healthcare with the Internet of Things, mHealth with IoT, healthcare with augmented reality (AR), and blockchain with EMR.
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) refers to the combination of medical devices and applications that connect to health IT systems using network technology. IoT use cases range from telemedicine technologies that improve patient-doctor communication to reduce potential exposure to infectious diseases, to various smart sensor technologies that can collect data at the user level. For example, COVID-19 has increased the demand for telemedicine services, leading more providers to use technology to deliver virtual services to patients.
Innovative IoT applications are emerging in healthcare. Cleveland Clinic ranked smartphone-based pacemaker devices as a top innovation for 2021. With a mobile app, smartphone-connected pacemaker devices can be designed to transmit data securely and wirelessly to a patient network. This allows patients to gain a deeper understanding of health data from their pacemaker and send that health information to their doctors.
MHealth, including wearables, apps and mobile technologies that provide access to medical support and monitoring, is growing to help manage long-term chronic conditions, among others. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased demand for personal health monitoring through wearables that straddle the line between consumer and medical devices. Wearable device vendors have added capabilities for heart rate variability, pulse oximetry, electrocardiograms and continuous glucose monitoring.
Another important application is blockchain-based EMR, which aims to reduce the time required to access patient information while improving data quality and interoperability. The benefits of blockchain (access security, data privacy, scalability) make it attractive in digital healthcare.
Using AI in healthcare applications can augment human decision-making by automating and speeding up tasks that were previously labor-intensive. For example, many hospitals use AI-based patient monitoring tools to gather and treat patients’ conditions based on real-time reports. In medical imaging, AI can reduce the number of clicks required to perform a task and determine next steps based on the context. Another AI application, digital twins, can be used to model medical equipment and patients and show how the equipment would function in real-world situations.
By integrating digital information with the user’s environment in real time, AR can be used for patient and doctor education, surgical visualization, disease simulation, and more.
Big data, which draws information from all these healthcare systems and applications, brings both benefits and challenges: the amount of data is huge and continues to grow.
Big Data in Healthcare
The digitization of health information has led to an increase in healthcare big data. The emergence of value-based care has also encouraged the industry to use data analytics to make informed business decisions, contributing to the emergence of healthcare big data.
According to Healthgrades, a website that helps users find the right doctors, hospitals, and medical care, “healthcare big data refers to the collection, analysis, and utilization of consumer, patient, physical, and clinical data that is too voluminous or complex to understand using traditional data processing methods. Instead, big data is often processed by machine learning algorithms and data scientists.”
But according to Healthgrades, “Faced with challenges including the volume, velocity, variety and accuracy of health data, health systems must embrace technologies that can collect, store and analyze this information to generate actionable insights.”
In healthcare, big data offers the following benefits:
Reducing medication errors. By analyzing patient records, the software can spot discrepancies between a patient’s health status and prescriptions, and notify medical professionals and patients of possible medication errors. Supporting preventive care. A large number of relapsing patients, or patients who visit frequently, overwhelm emergency rooms. Big data analytics can identify such patients and create preventative plans to prevent recurrence. More accurate staffing. Predictive analytics can help hospitals and clinics forecast admission rates and improve staffing schedules.
Benefits of Digital Health
Digital health has the potential to prevent disease and reduce healthcare costs, as well as help patients monitor and manage chronic conditions, and even tailor medications to individual patients.
Healthcare providers can also benefit from advances in digital health. Digital tools give healthcare providers greater access to health data and a broader view of patient health by giving patients more control over their health, resulting in greater efficiency and improved healthcare outcomes.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) states on its website, “From mobile health apps and software that support the clinical decisions clinicians make every day to artificial intelligence and machine learning, digital technologies have revolutionized health care. Digital health tools hold great potential to improve our ability to accurately diagnose and treat disease and enhance the delivery of health care to individuals.”
In addition, technologies such as smartphones, social networks, and Internet applications offer new ways for patients to monitor their health and improve their access to information. According to the FDA, “these advances are converging people, information, technology, and connectivity to improve care and health outcomes.”
According to the FDA, digital health technologies can help healthcare providers reduce inefficiencies, improve access, reduce costs, improve quality, and better personalize care for patients. At the same time, digital health technologies can also help patients and consumers more efficiently manage and track their health and wellness-related activities.
Technologies such as virtual reality (VR) tools, wearable medical devices, telemedicine, and 5G can help improve patient care, while medical professionals can use AI-powered systems to streamline workflows.
Digital Health Challenges
The digital transformation of healthcare is raising several challenges that affect patients, medical professionals, technology developers, policymakers, and others. The vast amount of data collected from different systems, each of which stores and codes data in different ways, makes data interoperability an ongoing challenge.
Further challenges relate to concerns ranging from patients’ digital literacy and the resulting inequalities in access to care, to questions about data storage, access, sharing, and ownership. These concerns, in turn, raise security and privacy issues. For example, what if employers or insurers want to collect data from employees’ direct-to-consumer genetic test results? Or what happens if medical devices are hacked?
Further concerns relate to technology and ethics: for example, when medical robots are used, who is responsible for mistakes made during surgery? The hospital, the technology developer or manufacturer, the doctor using the robot, or someone else?
Regulation and Patient Privacy
In the United States, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted in 1996 to protect patients’ personal data. HIPAA was amended in 2009 with the introduction of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which aimed to make HIPAA compliance stricter. However, critics of these laws say they are insufficient to limit access to patient data without consent, and HIPAA regulations are frequently violated. In late 2020, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed changes to HIPAA regarding privacy and security standards that would negatively impact patients’ ability to access their personal health data and hinder healthcare’s transition to value-based care, a model focused on value and quality of care.