5 BASIC PRINCIPLES OF DIGITAL HEALTH THAT ARE GOOD TO KNOW

Today, life standards and life quality are rising, thank to technological blooming and intellectual progress. Healthcare is a foundation of every person’s life standard requirement. The term “Digital Health” has been very popular over the decades and now, about 50% of healthcare sector worldwide has already integrated or currently integrating digital healthcare systems for better efficiency and productivity.

Obviously, it is now important to elucidate what the term “Digital Health” actually means. Incorrect interpretation can lead to short- and long-term difficulties of its efficient implementation into society. That’s why it is a good idea to understand the basics first, before digging deeper into digital health system components and principles.

WHAT DIGITAL HEALTH ISN’T

Before making it clear what Digital Health is, it’s important to understand what it actually isn’t. Digital health isn’t only the integration of AIs, VRs, tablets, search engines or websites to medical practice. It isn’t about considering the social media as a medium for new category of “socially” evolved diseases or as a medium for “digital” data collection and distribution eather. Moreover, only wearing a smartwatch or installing a biological clock tracking apps doesn’t make us wise enough to conclude that we clearly understand what Digital Health is and what is does. The vision of the future of Digital Health as an environment full of small sensors, chips and displays attached all over the place and tracking our state of health, sleep and activity rates - is incorrect. Nowadays, even more sophisticated healthcare specialists propagate a wrong vision of digital health future, thereby sowing doubts and fears in public against the idea of having a too “futuristic” healthcare environment.

WHAT DIGITAL HEALTH IS

Digital Health” is a result of merging of digital revolution with healthcare. But what plays what role? The main idea behind that is changing the medicine environment from a traditional to a modernized one. In other words, due to increasing life standards, as an outcome of digital revolution, it is the time to transform the healthcare ecosystem towards person-centralized/patient-oriented one. The “digital” part is responsible for sustaining new algorithms and paths to optimize the healthcare management system. Digital Health is a paradigm shift in medicinal environment to revolutionize the healthcare system, making it personalized, fair and accessible for everyone and everywhere, using technology for conduction and support.

WHEN DID THE DIGITAL HEALTH REVOLUTION START?

It is fair to say that digital health occured when technological revolution met healthcare. What we are experiencing over the past decades - isn’t really the first step towards digital health revolution. It all started back in 19th century. As, for example, the very first medical device was a stethoscope, invented in 1816 by a French physician René Laennec. 1850 was the year when the very first health insurance policy, which covered injuries received during accidents, came up for a discussion. This, however, is not only a digital or technological, but also a cultural transformation - the first attempts and idea to secure a human life by fusing traditional medicine with the innovative ideas.

The “digital” boom in healthcare, however, has come to place in early 1950s, during post-war period, as the first digital health policies were applied. These policies included the integration of computer systems for data collection and scientific researches, such as NHS’s computing policies. Simultaneously, a great attention was devoted to hospital management systems and social and health service societies formation, in order to sustain the technological and cultural modifications in healthcare. So, it is quite fair to state that cultural transformation triggered the digital health revolution, isn’t it?

WHO DOES THE DIGITAL HEALTH JOB?

Paradigm shift in healthcare has not only influenced the digital health as a final “product” we have today, but the healthcare management system as a whole, more precisely, its networking ecosystem. Unlikely the traditional medicine, exclusively consisting of hierarchical doctor-patient relationship, digital health requires a much larger networking medium for healthcare providers and patients to collaborate. Healthcare providers are the professionals all with different backgrounds, like medical doctors, researchers, scientists, law makers, quality and resource managers, etc, but with a shared goal. An important characteristic of such healthy co-working environment is its openness for new contributors. Such collaborative networking enables a very innovative approach for guiding the public with clear, accessible and safe healthcare data, which is medically, ethically, legally and economically accurate

HOW DOES THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL HEALTH LOOK LIKE?

A perfect image of what Digital Health looks like in the future can be divided  into several pieces:

• Technological. Current discoveries and developments in AI, Machine learning and other great projects can highly influence disease preventions, reduce surgery mortality rates, increase life expectancy rates through optimizing data procedure and minimizing uncertainties and operative risks. By 2024 up to almost 80% of european hospitals are prognosing to implement EHRs and AI systems in clinical practices.
• Social. Healthcare data should not only be owned by the authorities, i.e, hospitals, insurance companies or businesses, but also by the public - the actual data donators. Patients should have an opportunity to track and manage their data independently.
• Global. Due to rising life standards, sustainable and affordable healthcare solutions should be equally distributed to the destinations where healthcare is currently at a very unsatisfactory level. The global aim is to benefit as much of the world population as possible.

To sum up, digital health is not only about medical apps and equipment. It is, in first place, a new healthcare system philosophy, an ideal world of people collaborating and supporting a positive life quality trend.

Author: Narmin Dzhabbarova