Digital health enhances clinical care, powers public health
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Digital health technologies provide ‘multifold’ benefits by increasing access to patient lives and improving patient care, according to a presenter at the Crohn’s and Colitis Congress.
“Currently, health care models are looking at what we call visible data. If a patient comes to us, that's when you get the data points and they're very intermittent. But in reality, the patient is a continuous spectrum of symptoms and spectrum of input points, these are what we call invisible data points,” Sravanthi Parasa, MD, a gastroenterologist at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, told attendees. “For us to see the patient as a whole, we need tools and technology to help us gather the data and make sense out of it. That is where digital health comes in.”
The measures for which digital health come into play are broad, ranging from mobile health and health information technologies to wearable devices, telehealth and telemedicine, as well as personalized medicine. Digital health also includes technologies that use computing platforms, connectivity, software and sensors for health care and its related uses.
As we move toward the future of implementing digital health for a more patient-centered approach, digital clinical measures — health outcomes or physiological characteristics of an individual’s health, wellness and/or condition that are collected digitally with a sensor — will provide a wide range of benefits and continued advancement.
“The benefits of digital clinical measures are multifold,” Parasa said.
First, digital health accelerates clinical research through:
- expediting timelines and decreasing cost through improved enrollment, increased study power and reduced sample sizes;
- increasing applicability of research results to broader populations; and
- better informing regulatory and reimbursement decisions.
Second, digital health enhances clinical care by:
- improving the quality of information available to clinicians;
- improving care efficiency through a 24/7 model of care; and
- creating a more accessible patient-centric care.
Finally, digital health powers public health through:
- identifying behaviors and risk factors;
- delivering timely interventions toward improved prevention;
- providing surveillance tools to recognize trends that influence health outcomes; and
- better informing public health decision-making.
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