Thanks to digitalization, we’re witnessing a revolution in the prevention, treatment and management of health conditions. Digital health has provided a remarkable way for doctors and patients to connect with each other to improve treatment outcomes quickly and efficiently. Digital solutions offer convenience to both patients as well as healthcare professionals and hold the promise to help many but what are the main benefits?

Here is a brief discussion about the benefits of digital health and how it could turn out to be a major milestone for improving the healthcare systems across the world.

What is Digital Health?        

The scope of digital health includes different healthcare services provided to patients via advanced communication channels. These include health information technology (IT), mobile health (mHealth), telehealth, telemedicine, wearable devices, and personalized treatment just to name a few.

What Are the Main Benefits of Digital Health Technologies?

There are several mobile medical software and apps that can support the clinical decisions of physicians through machine learning and artificial intelligence. The main differential factor is if these solutions are clinically validated, like the RetinaRisk algorithm (backed by multiple clinical studies with patients all over the world), or do not have clinical validation.

Digital health technologies include the use of computing platforms, software, connectivity, and sensors that support the monitoring of health parameters while providing other related uses.

These new technologies offer an effective adjunct to medical products including drugs, devices, and biologics commonly used for the management of patients suffering from acute or chronic health issues such as diabetes. They may also be used to develop or study medical products.

The following are some of the ways Digital health can improve the services provided by physicians and help patients stay healthier.

Sustainable and Responsive Healthcare   

With an improvement in life expectancy, the number of people living with chronic diseases has been increasing steadily. This has led to a significant rise in the costs of healthcare services.

These changes in the healthcare sector have contributed to a growing shift towards digital health approaches for receiving treatments. Groundbreaking technologies are opening a new era of smart care and wearables. We covered Smart Contact Lenses on this article here as a way patients are taking control of their own health and empowering themselves to a better living.

Digital platforms can help patients receive quicker access to healthcare services thereby improving the quality of treatment they receive as well as the prognosis of their health issues. 

These platforms have also helped to reduce the burden on the healthcare professionals as well as facilities like clinics and hospitals by pioneering the concept of self-care by patients themselves.                               

Prevention Before Treatment                                            

Technologies that support digital health can help patients manage their health issues through regular monitoring of their symptoms.

Digital health offers a tool that can help in the early detection of signs indicating disease development and progression, before significant damage to the healthy tissues such as the lungs has occurred.

The timely detection of the warning signs through self-care by using digital health platforms can allow patients to avoid serious complications and prevent their health from being irreversibly compromised. An example of those is via Retinal Imaging Technology that helps detect the onset of diabetic retinopathy.

This is why; digital health platforms hold immense value, specifically for patients in diabetes and as we have shown with our app – preventing the onset of sight-threatening diabetic retinopathy.

Re-modeling of Patient-Doctor Relationship

Engaging in digital health systems can allow patients to connect with their healthcare providers more easily. It can make the patients the co-designers of their treatment plans in some cases.

Direct, quick, and shared access to their health status can help patients develop a sense of partnership and improve their trust in the physician and treatment. It can also help to maintain transparency in the patient-doctor relationship.

This information can represent a clear profile of the factors that can have an impact on the patient’s prognosis. This can allow doctors to recommend changes in the treatment, diet, and lifestyle to improve the prognosis further. The fresher the data, the better decision the doctors can take.

Expanding the Reach of Healthcare Professionals

The latest innovations in the digital health system are aimed at reducing the administrative burden on healthcare professionals and the repetitive aspects of the tasks they have to perform.

The main benefit of novel digital health systems is to reduce costs and make them more available and easier to access. This can allow them to spend more time with patients and help them develop an efficient patient-monitoring plan.

This is specifically important for clinics and patients located in rural areas and for home-care patients for whom travel is difficult or costly. The clinical-grade technologies offered by digital health can allow these patients to be equipped to provide critical health information to the physicians at any time.            

Reduces inefficiencies

Digital tools give healthcare providers a holistic view of the patient’s health through easy access to data. It can also allow patients to gain better control over their health thereby reducing inefficiencies in patient management. Paperwork and red tape will hopefully be a thing of the past soon enough!

Improve access

Digital health systems offer real-time opportunities to doctors to improve medical outcomes and treatment efficiency by providing quick access to the patient’s data in a format that can be interpreted easily with better clarity and accuracy.

Reduce costs

Digital health has helped reduce the cost of overall treatments by supporting the patient’s ability to manage self-care through the apps that can monitor their health parameters.

Increase quality

Digital health technologies can empower patients to make informed decisions about their health. It can provide options for facilitating early diagnosis, prevention, and management of chronic diseases outside of traditional healthcare settings. This has helped to improve the overall quality of the healthcare system across the world.

Make medicine more personalized for patients

Patients can use digital health technologies to manage and track their wellness-related activities. These technologies include the use of devices like smartphones, internet applications, and social networks that can help to personalize treatment plans for patients based on their specific complaints and health parameters.

Why is Digital Health Important?                 

Medical devices have the ability to communicate with other systems and devices. By securely sharing data across platforms, patients and doctors can get a better holistic view of the status of each individual’s state of health. Cloud-based solutions that share data will be the great revolution head to truly bring healthcare to the next level.

The advancement in digital health is expected to curb the growing incidences of several diseases by allowing patients to self-monitor their health and providing physicians easier access to patient data.

How Can RetinaRisk Support Your Eye Health?

RetinaRisk is an example of a digital health solution that is revolutionizing diabetic eye health. The clinically validated RetinaRisk algorithm accurately calculates the risk of sight-threatening diabetic eye disease. Diabetic retionpathy is one of the leading causes of blindness. It can be prevented in over 90% of cases with early detection and timely treatment. The RetinaRisk app empowers people with diabetes to assess and monitor their risk of sight-threatening diabetic eye disease. You can read more about the app here.

If you are a healthcare professional and you want to include our clinically validated software solution into your portfolio, we can provide you with a personalized offering thanks to our leading API service.          

Conclusion                      

Digital technology is driving the much-needed revolution in the healthcare systems across the world by incorporating technology into the field of medicine.

Digital health tools possess a great potential that can be put to use for improving the ability of doctors to diagnose and treat diseases more efficiently and accurately. It can support the delivery of efficient healthcare services and improve the prognosis of patients following treatments. We at RetinaRisk are at the forefront of driving this conversation further and helping doctors make better decisions and helping patients be more informed and empowered.