Tech Trends

Making the Best Use of Innovations in Digital Health

Digital health offers outstanding opportunities to close the persistent healthcare gaps. Success depends on medical professionals embracing innovations to serve a broader, more diverse patient population. -By Karen White

 Two primary trends are driving the undergoing transformation in the healthcare industry. One is technological advances that are increasing the quality of patient care, and the second is the consumer demand for social justice in the healthcare system. It is well-documented that there are underserved communities - of people of color, people in rural areas, and the elderly. Technology can improve patient care efficiency and results, increase access, and enable more people to remain through digital health monitoring. The tsunami of healthcare innovations is exciting as long as patients can access digital health technologies and medical personnel are trained to get the most out of them. The concern is that the health equity gap could widen, should the currently underserved populations continue to be excluded from access due to lack of internet availability, technology costs, and medical professionals who do not take full advantage of digital health opportunities.

The Wide World of Innovations in Digital Health
Digital health innovations are plentiful today, but there is plenty of room for improvement. The innovation software company Accept Mission delineates between push and pull innovations. Push innovations are creative solutions in products and services offered to employees, while pull innovations are solutions supported by employees. A push innovation is electronic health records (EHRs), and a pull innovation is the bottom-up medical smart home care in which patients take an active role in their healthcare to improve outcomes. Healthcare innovations, says Accept Mission, fall within the social innovations category because they are designed to address societal issues. These innovations can occur in various healthcare areas, including medical procedures, distribution channels, products and services, solutions, commodities, strategies, and processes. Technologies can improve patient outcomes, improve population health, and lower healthcare costs, yet bottlenecks remain that slow down innovation, and make it difficult to close the healthcare equity gap. These bottlenecks include the high cost of new innovations, complex bureaucratic processes that slow down innovation, and the lack of a coordinated effort to introduce innovations in the healthcare system.

The next generation of digital health technologies is impressive. For example, multi-omic technologies enable combining different data sets from omic groups (various biology disciplines like genomics and proteomics) for deeper disease analysis of molecular cell changes. At-home testing products are increasing in availability, with colon cancer screening and COVID virus testing serving as two good examples. Digital health technologies can enable the creation of digital health ecosystems, in which patient caregivers are connected no matter where they work. One of the healthcare industry needs to be addressed is finding solutions for centralized data access that people and healthcare providers trust. Artificial intelligence will play a more significant role in drug development, analyzing data, identifying diseases, and developing personalized care plans. Healthcare providers are increasingly offering patient portals that make it easy for patients to make appointments, ask questions, and request prescriptions and refills, improving operational efficiency and enabling the ability to provide direct care to more patients.

The Internet of Things combines medical devices and applications in health IT systems. It is applied in telemedicine, helps people avoid exposure to contagious diseases, and is used for smart sensor technologies that collect data. Smartphones are also playing a growing role in healthcare such as smartphone-connected pacemaker devices. Binah.ai developed a video-based solution that provides vital signs within two minutes. A video of a person’s upper cheek on a smartphone, laptop, or tablet can measure heart rate, mental stress level, respiration rate, heart rate variability, and more. Crucially, it works with any skin color, gender, and age. K Health provides 24/7 phone access to U.S. board-certified doctors in 48 states for its inexpensive subscription service that enables downloading a free AI-powered symptom-checker app. These are just a few remarkable innovations within the healthcare industry currently available or being developed globally.

Changing the Tide Of Healthcare Access

 For healthcare leaders, using the wealth of digital health technologies to close the healthcare equity gap is the true challenge. The World Economic Forum’s Centre for Health and Healthcare addressed the issue, saying, “A tide of health data and digital technologies – such as artificial intelligence (AI) and telemedicine – is sweeping away long-held preconceptions about global health and healthcare access and provision.” Health-focused technologies are driving new treatments, earlier diagnosis, better preventive medicine, and remote diagnosis and treatment of patients using telemedicine solutions.

Remote healthcare, like smart care in the home, is of course only possible when there is reliable internet service and people can and do connect to technologies. In the U.S., the FCC says that 6% of the population or 19 million Americans have no service and one-third of tribal areas lack access. In areas where broadband is available, approximately 100 million Americans do not subscribe. Another vital statistic is that more than 41% of Medicare patients do not have a desktop or laptop computer, and 41% do not have a smartphone. The people least likely to have digital access were 85 or older, enrolled in Medicaid, disabled, Black or Hispanic, or had a high school education or less.

Doctors and other medical personnel can get around the lack of access with new technologies such as wearable sensors that connect to satellite service. Accommodations such as closed captioning can make telemedicine more accessible to the elderly. Some companies are testing drones to deliver medical samples and supplies to remote areas. Technology can also help remove biases in healthcare treatments. For example, a single BMI threshold is used to calculate the risk of developing type 82 diabetes, but people of color develop diabetes at a lower BMI. Correcting algorithms to accurately inform decision-making is important to developing and utilizing unbiased innovations. Another issue is prioritizing investments in innovations to meet the needs of different groups based on gender, ethnicity, and race. Including diverse people in clinical trials is important, but the information should flow into relevant innovations.

Leave No Patient Behind

 Medical professionals are challenged in many ways: staying current on and implementing healthcare innovations, avoiding biases perpetuated in historical data that studies have clearly identified as existing, finding ways to take digital health to underserved populations in their area and beyond, and utilizing smart care systems in homes are just a few. McKinsey recommends that improving health equity requires adopting several best practices. One of them is developing community partnerships to introduce new technologies to gap communities that may not readily accept new digital solutions.

One of the important aspects of digital health is that it is still all about people. It sounds counterintuitive, but there is a risk of innovative digital healthcare technologies widening the healthcare equity gap, unless medical personnel know how to fully take advantage of them to serve a diverse population in need.

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