Consumer Digital Health

While screening has been shown to reduce breast cancer deaths, women who are economically disadvantaged are less likely to have breast cancer screening and more likely to die of the disease, often because breast cancer isn’t detected until it reaches a more advanced stage. Mammography screening rates plummeted during the COVID-19 pandemic, which only increased the disparity between economically advantaged and disadvantaged patients.

The Digital Accelerator will first focus on addressing unmet needs in patients suffering from atopic dermatitis in France, Italy and Spain. The team is developing an integrated platform and data solution to better engage with healthcare professionals (HCPs) and enhance their awareness as well as their patients’ awareness of the disease and the available treatment options.

Uncertainty runs deep in this industry. Patients, sensing (correctly) that there’s no easy way to tap into the vast knowledge of healthcare services, feel like they’re going it alone in a web of complex coverage stipulations, referrals, specialists, and co-pays. About half of Americans source their healthcare coverage through their employers, and yet, 80% of employees say they’re confused about their benefits.

Access to data in itself isn’t sufficient to drive innovation and realise the benefits of this new age of information. Instead, we must take a more comprehensive, systematic and global approach to the generation, distribution and utilisation of data, including who generates it, for whom and for what purpose. This approach must promote the development of new, urgently needed data sets for patient populations both large and small while also fostering modern industrial policy to create new markets, develop improved privacy controls and support equitable health-care delivery.

Health apps and digital tools have the potential to help alleviate some of the huge pressures the NHS faces from Covid-19, the backlog of care and rising demand. But introducing these tools into health care and supporting people to use them is never a quick fix, and they will not work for everyone. This summary provides a set of lessons for ensuring digital health innovations are applied in optimal ways for the people using them. The findings are based on a large-scale evaluation of digital technologies being implemented in health and social care in East London.

Digital health in the mental health care industry is proving to be particularly influential. At a consumer level, the rise of mental health apps and the introduction of telehealth services has made it easier to access crucial care and resources. At a provider level, digital health is helping to ensure a more open line of communication between doctors and other professionals within the healthcare industry.

In the race to roll out telehealth offerings and digital patient engagement tools during the height of the pandemic, many providers and health plans inadvertently created a rag-tag assortment of patient portals, health apps and clunky websites that can be impossible to navigate and even more difficult to integrate with existing tech infrastructure. To overcome these obstacles, providers and payers need to take a holistic approach to digital patient engagement, one that makes it seamless for patients to coordinate care with multiple providers across digital, telehealth and face-to-face interactions.

Founded in 2011, Altibbi is the largest AI-based digital health provider in the Arab world with unrivaled scale and innovation. The Company hosts over two million pages of content and has published six peer-reviewed scientific papers in the last year alone. It has conducted 4.5 million telehealth consultations to date, has 20 million unique visitors a month to its platform, and offers its 24/7 telehealth services across seven regional countries – with over 1,500 active certified doctors on the platform. Altibbi’s AI engine, created by their leading team of data scientists, engineers and clinicians, also provides a unique capability for a comprehensive patient solution.

Doctors have always had to grapple with how to transfer, incorporate, and standardize new knowledge. But this task has gotten exponentially harder. First anatomy, then germ theory, the discovery of disease pathways, the creation of screening and diagnostic tests, procedures, and treatments, followed by the increasing medical complexity of chronic conditions and longevity and the rise of genetics and epigenetics. Alongside these advances are new guidelines, standards of care, quality metrics, and thousands of new peer-reviewed articles each month. Synthesizing all this would require hundreds of hours a month — time and energy clinicians just don’t have.

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For years, when patients needed a new prescription or a refill on existing medication, they were required to make an appointment to see their doctor in person. However, when COVID-19 hit in 2020, lockdowns and closures forced a rapid shift to digital healthcare, with many in-person doctor appointments replaced by telemedicine or virtual visits — yet through it all, the need for prescription medications did not disappear.
With the shift to digital health here to stay — a recent report found that almost half of Canadians have now accessed a physician using virtual care, and 91 percent are satisfied with the service they received — the healthcare industry faces some important questions.

For hospitals and health systems, the past two years of Covid-19 have seen a whipsaw of crises. Digital tools have been rushed in, helping to keep clinics open while enabling innovations in patient communications as well as workforce health and remote patient monitoring. Even institutions lacking digital health strategies managed to implement tactical initiatives. Organizations with established digital strategies, meanwhile, fared better—they leveraged existing staff and tools in new ways.

At the end of 2019, the Digital Healthcare Act (Digitales Versorgungsgesetz, DVG) introduced a dedicated pathway enabling reimbursement of digital health offerings in Germany, bringing more transparency into the approval process for manufacturers, physicians, and patients. Although its scope is narrow and the bar for inclusion high, many consider the DVG a breakthrough that allowed Germany to advance from a relatively low level of healthcare digitization (among developed countries) into a role model position. Since the first digital health application (digitale Gesundheitsanwendung, DiGA) was approved for reimbursement in September 2020, 28 DiGAs have now been approved for reimbursement, either provisionally or permanently.

The continued emphasis on digital health is overrated but digital health will become an integral part of total patient care. To become a vital part of patient care, digital health providers need to provide the medical community with studies that show their value to patient outcomes. The rapid advancement in the digital healthcare field brings many advantages and a few problems that shouldn’t be ignored.

For digital health entrepreneurs, unless your intended use puts you in the FDA category of a medical device, you don’t need to show that your product is safe and effective, let alone cost-effective. In most cases, rather, you need to demonstrate to investors that it can quickly scale and make money and the sooner the better. Too bad. You would think that whether you have to or not that prudent sick care business practices would mean creating a product that does what you say it will do. That’s why only a handful of the hundreds of thousands of digital health apps are clinically valid.

The startup helps people suffering from chronic illnesses by selling its remote-monitoring and gamified healthcare platform to major pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Bayer and private insurers in the US and Europe. Sidekick is developing 18 digital treatments, covering conditions as diverse as diabetes and ulcerative colitis, and has 14 of those out in commercial partnerships. Eventually, Thorgeirsson tells Sifted, the plan is to build out more than 40 digital therapies. The idea is to provide ultra-personalised app-based treatment that can manage illness and catch serious conditions before they become life threatening, he adds.

AS SOON AS the covid-19 pandemic began, several research institutes around the world set up studies asking people to share data from their wearable fitness trackers. On most devices, signing up involved just a few clicks, and people did so enthusiastically. The biggest study, the Corona Data Donation project set up by the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, enrolled more than 500,000 people. Over 30,000 signed up for DETECT, a study by the Scripps Research Institute in California.

GV (formerly Google Ventures) backed the most digital health companies at 22, making it the most active investor in the space four years in a row. But GV was in good company, as many invested in the space. For example, Maverick Ventures supported 20. And Salesforce’s and Sony’s venture arms funded over 5 digital health companies each in 2021. Further, the venture arms of several healthcare companies also invested. For example, Kaiser Permanente, Johnson & Johnson, and Optum participated in 2021, with 10 deals, 9 deals, and 11 deals respectively, according to the report. New investors joined the ranks, too. Specifically, CVS Health started its CVS Health Ventures in 2021 with a fund of $100 million.

The rise of value-based care, the shift from acute to chronic diseases, increased life expectancy, and the transition of treatments from hospital to home are long-term drivers of more agile and personalized healthcare; as a result, a digitized, connected, and consumer-like model is emerging.

The two companies say they plan to launch a series of Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) companion apps for various diseases, including asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and heart failure, as well as technology for running decentralised clinical trials. The move marks an uptick in investment in digital health for AZ, which has been less visible than some of its peers in the big pharma sector in embracing the category. It effectively makes Huma AZ’s “extended digital health arm”, the startup’s chef executive Dan Vahdat told CNBC.

The company’s vision is straightforward: “As care settings extend beyond the hospital, with increasing ambulatory and home care, the health IT landscape is growing accordingly. Health systems are seeking ways to improve patient and provider experiences and better deliver care throughout the continuum by connecting data from various points-of-care and disparate systems. Cloud-based, integrated platforms are increasingly recognized for their ability to liberate data from siloes and derive meaningful insights that support workflows enabling precise, proactive and integrated care delivery.”

Healthcare providers are embracing digital health services and technologies to extend care to their patients. What is digital health? Digital health is when practitioners use technology to help improve their patients’ health and treatment process. Digital health includes the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), wearable gadgets, Telemedicine EMR Software, mobile apps for doctors and patients, and electronic medical records software. These digital healthcare trends have transformed the way the healthcare system operates by improving care quality and extending remote care options which were especially seen as life-saving during the pandemic.