The term “digital health” or “digital healthcare” refers to a broad, multidisciplinary concept that includes concepts from the intersection of technology and healthcare.
Digital health applies digital transformation to the healthcare sector, including software, technology, and services. Digital health encompasses telehealth and telemedicine, wearable technology, electronic health records (EHRs), electronic medical records (EMRs), mobile health (mHealth) apps, and personalized medicine.
Patients, healthcare professionals, researchers, application developers, medical device makers, and distributors are some stakeholders in the digital health field.
What is Digital Health?
Digital health refers to using various technologies, including telehealth services, health information technology, and mobile health (mHealth), to improve communication between doctors and patients throughout healthcare systems. The breadth of digital health offers consumers greater access to and ownership over their information and allows doctors to comprehensively understand their patient’s health.
Digital health technology has become more significant over time, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Modern digital health solution improves relationships between patients and their doctors, expands preventive disease strategies, and shifts healthcare toward value-based treatment, increasing access to health information for patients and providers.
How Important Is Digital Health?
Communication between systems and devices is possible between medical devices. Patients and medical professionals can better understand each person’s health status by safely transferring data between platforms. The tremendous transformation that will take healthcare to the next level will be led by cloud-based digital health solutions that exchange data.
By enabling people to track their health and giving doctors easy access to patient data, digital health is predicted to stop the rising rates of various diseases.
The Benefits of Digital Health
To monitor health metrics and serve other relevant purposes, digital health technologies use computing platforms, software, connectivity, and sensors.
The handling of patients that require chronic care management (CCM) services, such as diabetes, can be effectively aided by these new technologies. Medical items, such as medications, devices, and biologics, are frequently employed in this regard. Additionally, they could be utilized to research or develop medicinal items.
Here are a few ways digital health might help patients stay healthier while enhancing doctors’ services.
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Responsive and Sustainable Healthcare
The number of people living with chronic diseases has gradually risen as life expectancy has increased. The price of healthcare services has increased dramatically as a result of this.
Due to changes in the healthcare industry, there has been a rising shift toward using digital health approaches for treatment. A new era of wearables and competent care is being ushered in by ground-breaking technologies.
By introducing the idea of self-care patient remote monitoring solution, these platforms have also contributed to easing the pressure on medical staff members and facilities like clinics and hospitals.
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Prevention Before Treatment
By regularly monitoring and tracking symptoms, digital health technologies assist people in managing their health issues. More importantly, it is a technique for the early diagnosis of critical alterations in disease progression in a patient before lung health has been irreparably affected. As a result, both those with respiratory diseases and those who are considered “at risk” can significantly benefit from using digital health platforms.
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Remodeling Doctor-Patient Relationship
By involving patients in formulating their care and treatment plans, digital health systems include patients and their medical professionals. The simplicity of direct, shared access to a patient’s health status enhances the doctor-patient relationship’s sense of partnership, transparency, and trust. A clear profile of the sensitivity of the patient’s condition can be prevented by real-time logging of significant health-related elements such as time of day, environmental stimulants, medication use, and treatment adherence.
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Expanding The Reach of Healthcare Professionals
Digital healthcare solutions aim to reduce the administrative workload and other tedious tasks that healthcare professionals must complete. As a result, they spend more time interacting with and monitoring patients. This is essential for patients, clinics, outpatient care facilities, or home care settings where travel may be difficult or not recommended. Patients are prepared to provide their doctor access to their health information anytime, thanks to the clinical-grade technologies they carry.
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Leveling The Platform
The cost of managing a patient’s ailment is lessened for both the clinic and the patient since clinics have access to reasonably priced medical technologies. Many online communities are accessible through digital health platforms, providing patients with support and opportunities to interact with people with comparable medical conditions.
Challenges of Digital Health
Several issues that affect patients, medical professionals, technology developers, policymakers, and others have been brought up by the digital revolution of healthcare. Data interoperability is a continuous difficulty due to the enormous amounts of data collected from numerous systems that store and code data differently.
Additional difficulties stem from data storage, access, sharing, and ownership, patient computer literacy problems, and unequal healthcare access. These considerations subsequently lead to worries about security and privacy. What would happen, for instance, if employers or insurers wished to aggregate data from the results of genetic tests given directly to consumers by employees? What happens if medical equipment gets tainted?
Concerns about technology and ethics are also present. For instance, who is accountable for surgical errors when medical robots are employed: the hospital, the company that developed or manufactured the technology, the physician who utilized the robot, or someone else?
How will Digital Health Develop in the Future?
Although digital health is still relatively new in the United States, consumers can take control of their care as healthcare services continue to shift to a digital paradigm. As a result, people of all generations will be better informed about their health and able to decide what kind of care they need. There have been many developments in digital health in the United States by a leading healthcare technology company under the name of CareCloud Wellness.
Recently, CareCloud exhibited live at the 2022 Becker’s Health IT, digital health, and RCM annual meeting in Chicago to share and learn about the information technology problems affecting the healthcare sector and the advancements transforming care delivery with their Digital health solutions.
The digital health suite of technologies known as CareCloud Wellness is advancing the next generation of healthcare. Be a part of the industry’s transition from transactional to relational interactions.
To learn more about CareCloud Wellness, schedule a demo today!
