Consumer Digital Health

The dermatologist tested out the app for this article. She Is critical about it: “I noticed a bunch of limitations. For example, it does not take into account a patient’s story, something that is really important in order to make a good assessment of a skin patch.” She also raises questions about the use of phone cameras: “If you upload a blurry photo, you don’t get any kind of notification that the photo is too blurry. That’s crazy, because you can’t get proper advice that way, can you?” Several studies, including a study published in the Netherlands Journal of Medicine, show that similar apps have a low positive predictive values. The study found that a large proportion of app users receive false warnings about possible skin cancer and are quickly advised to seek medical attention.

Prominent investors think the explosion of funding during COVID-19 was a good thing, but the ongoing market correction is a good thing, too.

Patient engagement is an important part of your health care services, as it can help boost your patient’s motivation to get better. You don’t want to communicate with your patients to make them feel down or feel helpless with their health conditions. Thus, creating the patient engagement strategies for your health care organization is paramount for the health improvement of your patients.

By following the patient at each stage of its disease progression, from diagnosis to disease management, and integrating a variety of technologies, digital health provides deeper insights and help for care management.

The meteoric rise of telehealth and other types of virtual care during the Covid-19 pandemic sparked some of the highest funding in digital health’s history. This avalanche of investment — akin to the boom in electronic health record systems more than a decade ago — created a media frenzy, with health care and consumer media outlets creating the impression that digital health will solve the industry’s problems. Not all of this enthusiasm was misplaced. Digital health continues to massively change the health care industry. Yet health care providers, payers, and investors have become warier about funding and partnering with startups. Several high-profile and well-funded digital health companies were recently shown to have misled, overprescribed, or were outright fraudulent in their claims toward customers and partners.

Over time — and various financing rounds — Truepill saw opportunity in selling diagnostics and telehealth services. Eventually, it expanded beyond brands that serve directly to consumers and aimed at institutions such as healthcare plans, life science companies and providers. Today’s move is in stark contrast to how Truepill characterized its business just months prior; then it appeared to be in a position of offense, the company claimed to be bringing in $300 million in revenue in 2021.

Digital health is a discipline that includes digital care programs, technologies that span mobile health (mHealth), health information technology, wearable devices, telemedicine, personalized medicine, diagnostics and biologics. It is supported under a framework of analytics that serves data to all stakeholders.

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.

Many healthcare organizations are seeking to harness the vast potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its four components — machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), deep learning, and robotics — to transform their clinical and business processes. They seek to apply these advanced technologies to make sense of an ever-increasing “tsunami” of structured and unstructured data, and to automate iterative operations that previously required manual processing.

What are digital health tools? There are several competing definitions but perhaps the most important one with is what the public make of this evolving industry and of the tools they are prepared to use.

The largest growth in adoption was among digital health tools that aid in remote care. The percentage of physicians using tele-visits/virtual visits grew from 14% in 2016 to 80% in 2022 while the percentage of physicians using remote monitoring devices grew from 12% in 2016 to 30% in 2022. The digital health tools that garner the most enthusiasm among physicians are tele-visits (57%) followed by remote monitoring devices (53%).

Millions of connected implant devices constantly collect data from patients around the world. And yet healthcare providers often struggle to extract timely and actionable insights into patients’ wellbeing and make proactive interventions. Medtronic, the largest global medical device company, chose OutSystems to build FocusOn™, a remote monitoring and triaging platform for cardiac conditions that saves clinical staff time and ensures better outcomes for patients.

Some of digital health’s best-capitalized startups are struggling. A string of healthcare unicorns have announced layoffs over the past few weeks, including Ro, Cerebral, Forward and Calibrate. While these companies are all targeting different corners of the healthcare world — from direct-to-consumer healthcare to virtual mental health support — the layoffs show a similar response to the macroeconomic environment. It’s a shift in tone for the companies, many of which were valued at over $1 billion and enjoyed a massive spike in customer interest during the pandemic. For early-stage entrepreneurs, this shift brings a set of lessons on the nuances of operating in digital health.

These positive trends for digital health have no doubt attracted many people who are passionate about improving healthcare to start their own company. However, there is much to consider when building a startup, especially one based in the healthcare field. In this blog, we reveal the most common mistakes digital health startup founders make and how to prevent them from happening for new founders.

An eight-week intervention with the smartphone application induced physical activity of moderate intensity through intrinsic motivation enhancement. We suggest that the motivation enhancement application could be an efficient option for maintaining and promoting psychosocial health behavior. This smartphone application can be applied to any other disease that needs behavioral change. Through the application, a broader spectrum of the population, regardless of time, space, and human resources, can benefit from community health services.

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.