Digital Therapeutics Alliance announces partnerships, tools to advance digital health

Key takeaways:

• Digital therapeutics have been defined by the International Organization for Standardization.
• A toolkit aimed to increase access and engagement is now available on the Digital Therapeutics Alliance website.

WASHINGTON — New partnerships and resources were announced at a press conference that concluded the Digital Therapeutics Alliance Summit.

Through a collaboration with Digital Therapeutics Alliance (DTA), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has developed a definition for digital therapeutics (DTx).

“We often hear from different regulatory agencies or policymakers, ‘We need something ... that is internationally recognizable, that has a standard setting level of recognition that we can adopt more globally’,” DTA founder Megan Coder said. “So with that, I've been working with ISO for the past 2 years to work on developing a new definition of a digital therapeutic product.”

DTx is now defined as: A health software intended to treat or alleviate a disease, disorder, condition or injury by generating and delivering a medical intervention that has a demonstrable positive therapeutic impact on a patient’s health.

Additionally, DTA announced a partnership with Healthware Group, a health care technology firm, to launch a website and report that follows the policy pathways of DTx in Europe.

“It's reporting on and is providing clarity on the existing and evolving policy frameworks country by country,” said Kristin Milburn, chief marketing officer of Healthware Group.

Another announcement at the press conference included the launch of Digital Health Technology Classification through DTA’s partnership with Health Advances, a health care consulting firm.

“We went to look at what health systems or trade associations, professional societies, clinicians and payers have to say about digital health technologies, how they categorize them, and how they define them,” Health Advances Vice President Jeffrey Abraham said. “What we ended up doing ... is coming out with a updated categorization that goes across eight different categories across three different stakeholders.”

The DTA website, dtxalliance.org, now features an Evaluation Toolkit aimed to increase DTx access and engagement. The free site will make evidence-based data and information available to increase innovation and health equity.

“I've had this vision in mind for quite a long time now,” Coder told Healio. “The next phase is ... how do we create a new vision to actually implement this and scale this type of work to engage policymakers more directly, and how do we actually start to create more of the infrastructure to enable this to happen?”