Digital Health

The healthcare industry is under tremendous pressure to deliver higher-quality care at lower cost. Lack of enough health insurance, ineffective government policies, and hard-to-access health record data lead to delayed treatment of diseases, increased complexity, and higher cost of treatment. A shortage of skilled healthcare professionals, the emergence of new diseases, and changing expectations from patients make it still more difficult. Going digital is one key to reducing cost by streamlining organizational processes, analyzing the clinical data needed to make better healthcare decisions, and offering better health management tools to caregivers and consumers.

Scores of health providers, both startups and established players, are trying new approaches that use emerging technologies to deliver healthcare services more effectively, often with a focus on prevention, wellness, and managing chronic conditions. Innovators and early adopters of digital health are relying on emerging technologies (cloud, AI, analytics, social, cyber), reengineering patient experience and operations (comprehensive patient engagement, personalized medicine, coordinated care and record keeping), and focusing on delivering innovative solutions to earn a share of the trillions of dollars in annual healthcare spending. Figure 1 provides details on some of the key capabilities required to achieve the full benefit of digital healthcare.

Forward, a medical startup just launched by serial entrepreneur Adrian Aoun, provides access to futuristic primary care for US $149 a month. There are no copays, and membership — as with Netflix — covers an all you-can-consume set of services from the practice: doctor visits, a baseline screening, access to Forward’s team of doctors and nurses via email, ongoing monitoring through wearable devices, and even some medications and supplements. You’ll still need to buy insurance to cover things like hospitalizations, surgeries, and specialist care, but Forward takes care of basic healthcare at a much more reasonable cost.