Digital health: current trends and applications on innovative care

Traditional healthcare is moving towards a new scenario of digitally connected care ecosystems. A driving force is emerging that can help the transition from reactive to proactive strategies, improving patient interaction and transforming the digital sector. Digital health is a strategic approach to address current health challenges, such as the increasingly aging and isolated population, the prevalence of chronic diseases, and the shortage of health professionals, among others.?

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Digital technologies can transform and optimize global healthcare, as they can potentially accelerate human progress and develop knowledge societies. An innovative health ecosystem is being shaped, creating a continuum of care that breaks traditional time and space barriers. As a part of this vision, this article presents two products from Altice Labs’ portfolio: Medigraf and SmartAL.

Trends such as remote monitoring (diagnosis, consultation, and surgical), Internet of things (IoT) devices, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI), can contribute to a new paradigm of preventive medicine and help to reduce pressure and costs on healthcare systems.

The World Health Organization (WHO) identifies international cooperation as a critical issue concerning digital health in Europe, underlining the importance of platforms like the e-health Network.

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Critical health scenarios

?If the past years have taught us anything, it is that health emergency situations are escalating, emphasizing the need for effective responses. The COVID-19 pandemic sped up digital transformation and established new opportunities to reconfigure both patients and health professionals’ digital experiences. Now it is crucial to expand the previous innovative digital care delivery models and integrate them with the new ones.

This digital transformation is proving to have a positive impact on the healthcare system, but there are still some bureaucratic and regulatory issues, as well as users’ skills and attitudes, that remain potential barriers.?

The pandemic has proven that digital health solutions can help to better understand and address disparities, as well as improve health equity.

Despite the benefits it brings, digital health may also amplify inequalities regarding access to healthcare services. To mitigate this, it is important to develop policies and strategies that promote health literacy and intensify patients’ readiness to adopt digital health solutions.

Active aging and chronic conditions

Older adults, chronic patients, or individuals in fragile situations, such as post-operative, clinic recoveries or prolonged treatments, should not be institutionalized longer than the absolute necessary for a number of reasons, including clinical, economical, and most importantly, human reasons. Instead, these people can remain in the comfort of their homes, as long as they are frequently monitored and maintain remote communication with their caregivers. Patients should be as autonomous as possible, actively engage on getting healthier, and feel safe. Telemonitoring and teleconsultation tools can help both patients and professionals in their daily lives. Caregivers can use these tools to schedule important tasks and provide reminders to the patients about their responsibilities, such as attending teleconsultations, measuring vital signs, taking their medication, and perform physical activity. Altice has developed a telemonitoring platform called SmartAL to help institutions, their staff and patients with all these daily routines.

Surgical care in vulnerable sites

Virtual and augmented technologies can be of value to vulnerable sites, such as remote areas, as they can extend real-time collaboration between healthcare professionals as well as reduce the need for long-distance travel.

Altice’s experience in providing teleconsultation services (offered by Medigraf) has connected specialized hospitals in Portugal to institutions in countries such as Cape Verde, Angola, and Sao Tome and Principe since the year 2000. This has been made possible by the availability of reliable connectivity.

The adoption of 5G technology holds significant importance in scenarios that demand reliable connectivity for effective operations.

Rescue scenarios

For remote monitoring and evaluation, drones provide solutions that can increase the quality of healthcare services in critical scenarios.

Combined with 5G networks, drones can integrate an innovative health approach that supports critical scenarios’ communications. This means that rescue teams can use complementary monitoring solutions to communicate with drones, which can enable aerial observation of accident scenarios and facilitate real-time rescue operations.

Altice Labs has already used a 5G infrastructure to demonstrate the potential of teleconsultation, monitoring, and aerial observation.

Using 5G-enabled healthcare applications in emergency situations is of the utmost importance, especially in places with difficult access, such as ravines.

Emergent technologies

Big data, analytics, and AI

These technologies allow for a better collection and analysis of patient data in healthcare, enriching prevention, monitoring, diagnosing, demand management, and fostering innovation and research.

When looking at the services level, an integrated and interoperable approach to health data is crucial. Data is currently being collected from numerous types of sources, like clinical devices, wearables, questionnaires, exams, images, etc. However, the challenge is to guarantee high-quality data, as analytics and machine learning (ML) algorithms do not perform effectively on poor-quality data.

In collaboration with external entities and universities, Altice Labs is currently working on the analysis and development of AI/ML algorithms to support the diagnosis and give recommendations to patients suffering from retinopathy and chronic diseases.

Ambient sensing and connected technologies

Digital technologies can support healthcare providers in delivering better home care and can also clear a path for new models of hospital-at-home care.

Wearable biosensors play an important role in collecting and monitoring physiological data that, when combined with other information, can support clinical decisions, expanding care beyond hospital walls. It is a new approach that can improve outcomes, reduce costs, and offer more convenient care.

Ambient sensing and connected technologies, such as assistive healthcare robots, have great potential as quick healthcare enablers to help elderly patients and people with limited mobility in their daily activities. These robots can remind patients of medication schedules and ask them to measure their blood pressure, as they have a Bluetooth interface that allows them to collect vital signs from several clinical devices.

As for teleconsultations, these can offer non-emergency care, symptom triage, and improved access to healthcare services, which is particularly relevant for those with mobility challenges and chronic conditions.

New scenarios of participatory health are emerging, with empowered patients-at-home being active participants in their healthcare. It is also of utmost importance to include them in the design of healthcare models.

Altice Labs has developed two healthcare solutions, Medigraf and SmartAL, as part of this vision.

Virtual and Augmented Reality

Healthcare paradigms are evolving, placing the patient at the center, developing a continuous process and shifting the care from a hospital-driven approach to a home-driven or pervasive approach. In this context, the wide adoption of new low-cost and patient-adaptive technologies for remote patient management is enabling trustful, transparent, and minimally intrusive monitoring. These technologies harness effective pHealth solutions - personal, personalized, predictive, preventive, pervasive, and participatory.

Cognitive and physical rehabilitation based on Virtual Reality exergames is just a fraction of the broad potential of emerging Extended Reality and AI technologies applied to this new context.

We have been unlocking a powerful ecosystem around SmartAL’s task scheduling and monitoring capabilities, which may play a significant role in our aging society. This ecosystem will provide patients, relatives, and caregivers a balanced set of XR tools to support particular rehabilitation needs, as well as prevent their occurrence through regular monitored activity. The goal is to maintain and improve individuals’ physical and cognitive capabilities, for a better assisted life.

Altice Labs’ e-health solutions

Medigraf

Medigraf is a teleconsultation and clinical data-sharing solution that enables remote cooperation among healthcare professionals. It offers a web environment for conducting medical appointments using audio and video conferencing tools, allowing real-time sharing of medical information.

The original strategic purpose of this tool was to address the lack of specialized healthcare professionals in remote areas, improve patient diagnoses and treatments, and allow healthcare professionals to work remotely as a team. Medigraf also allows to schedule and perform direct teleconsultation appointments with patients, which proved to be particularly valuable during the pandemic. Medigraf has become an essential tool for healthcare institutions and is currently being utilized in different hospitals in Portugal and Portuguese-speaking African countries.

SmartAL

SmartAL is a technological ecosystem designed to simplify people’s daily lives from a clinical and social perspective. It is a telemonitoring and teleconsultation tool that allows to follow in real-time the health status of the patient and assist with several complementary actions.

The core functionality of SmartAL consists of collecting and displaying patient information from clinical and non-clinical devices (e.g. wearables), to have an overview of the patient’s vital signs. The collected data is compared with the thresholds previously set by health professionals, and if values are outside the limits, notifications are immediately sent so that actions can be taken. In addition, it offers other useful functionalities such as personal clinical data management, daily task scheduling, file transfer, questionnaires, support videos, audio-video communication and chat.

SmartAL is multilingual and is accessible through multiple devices and interfaces so that it can be adapted to the needs of each customer. The platform provides all the configured services and manages the scheduling of each user, generating automatic alerts and notifications that can be sent to both end-users and caregivers on multiple interfaces.?

Discover more about Altice Labs' digital health products on?our website.

Authors

• Ana Margarida Almeida, Altice Labs
• Telma Mota, Altice Labs
• Fausto Carvalho, Altice Labs

Keywords:?Healthcare; E-health; Digital health; Medigraf; SmartAL

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