The Promise of Digital Health

Since joining the Board of 1st Group Ltd with Visionflex I have worked to educate myself on change underway in the health sector and digital innovation in particular. I attended the excellent Wild Health Summits in Sydney this week, and the biggest takeaways were personal, as well as professional.

I am very lucky to have no chronic disease and my recent health record is comprised of vaccinations and GP visits for occasional check-ups or minor ailments. Hence, I have had no personal need, or motivation, to keep up with changes in healthcare services for serious or chronic conditions.

Like many others, when "My Health Record" was introduced by the federal government I read negative commentary on privacy risks and opted out of the system. I now realise this was a mistake and that by being so passive I have discouraged health professionals from embracing the digital innovation in healthcare that it offers.

I clearly understand the impact and benefits of digital innovation in other consumer services, especially in financial services. The ability to maintain and share health records, under our own control with extensive privacy protections, is a critical enabler of better care, especially in a medical emergency. A financial services equivalent, although not so life and death, is the ability of my bank to use its understanding of my usual spending patterns to proactively identify and protect me from potentially fraudulent activity on my accounts.

As several speakers pointed out, many consumers of healthcare services, myself included, have been stuck, unthinkingly, in a face-to-face paradigm. We are not yet aware or as trusting of remote healthcare, despite obvious advantages; although this has changed somewhat during COVID. We focus on GP service availability, and we want our politicians to build vast, expensive hospitals to house us when we undergo significant medical procedures or are seriously unwell.

There are many downsides for patients in face-to-face healthcare such as:

- the risk of cross-infections

- the inconvenience of travel and associated health impacts

- long waits for the attention of, often over-stretched, medical staff

- usually being constrained to the skills and resources within the patient’s local area

In addition, in the hospital context:

- monitoring of health signs that is often highly manual and reliant on busy nursing staff juggling the priority of patients with a myriad of different conditions and statuses

- reliance on highly finite resources leading to, for instance, the occurrence of 'ambulance ramping' and with local shortages in key specialisations.

- patient stress and loss of contact with family, as well as the impacts of their absence on family members and dependents.

From the perspective of the healthcare sector over-reliance on face-to-face interactions has a massive impact on costs, productivity and outcomes, as specialists travel from clinic to clinic. With no easy access to our records, most often still stored in paper files at the site of treatment, there is an over-reliance on high-level and sometimes inaccurate referral letters, discharge forms or patient recollection of information. I am sure I am not the only person who for most of their life has had no idea of something as basic as their blood group. ?

Most of us are familiar with the power of Bluetooth and WIFI device connection via mobile and internet connections - wired and wireless - to cloud-based services in many other aspects of our lives. Examples range from gaming and gambling to working from home, keeping in touch with family and friends, banking, ticketing or streaming entertainment – and healthcare. For many, mobile phones and watches are constantly monitoring our body as we go about our day – heartbeat, stress, blood-oxygen, blood pressure and more. We can record and store an ECG and monitor our sleep patterns. Many of us have digital thermometers, scales and other monitors in our homes already, although often not yet Bluetooth enabled for integration. For now, this largely serves our curiosity, but imagine if this information was integrated into our complete health records and automatically monitored. If we, and our family, carers and primary healthcare providers were alerted to potential problems before they became serious.

Unfortunately, many of those with chronic conditions or at risk of medical emergency, who could benefit most from such devices, do not have access to them. If, instead of spending $100M's on just one hospital, that money was put into remote monitoring equipment which could be used from the patient’s home, then each $ would be factors more effective. In addition to automated monitoring, increasingly supported by clinically verified artificial intelligence (AI), this could enable video, voice and diagnostic interactions with medical specialists based anywhere, at any time and immediately in case of a possible emergency.

For my part, since the conference on Monday, I have now enabled "My Health Record" and will be encouraging those I interact with in healthcare to use the system, to the eventual enormous benefit of patients and the healthcare system as data accumulates. Beyond individual patient care the anonymised consolidation of data would be a treasure trove for medical research.

I have also discovered that as well as the “MyGov” website and app there is a dedicated “My Health Record” app, helping me to manage privacy or share the information. Sharing might be very useful to international travellers like myself, given there is currently little international integration of health records.

With a little further investigation I found the “Healthdirect” app. This is an excellent curated and trustworthy source of practical advice for minor health conditions, or of the immediate action needed for more critical conditions.

However, to end on a warning note, a story was told at the Wild Health Summits of AI invention of non-existent research results. This was a good reminder not to rely on web searches or artificial intelligence for your healthcare, this is not the 'digital health' I advocate! It highlights the ongoing vital role and responsibility of healthcare professionals to ensure evidence-based treatments, for which we are all grateful. Let's do all we can to maximise their productivity and improve our own health outcomes.