Digital Health

What is Digital Health?

Is the use of technologies, computing platforms, connectivity, software, and sensors for health care and related uses. It includes categories such as mobile health (mHealth), health information technology (IT), wearable devices, telehealth and telemedicine, and personalized medicine.

What are Digital Health Tools:

1. AI Tech

Artificial intelligence is a fast-glowing technology changing how we interact with each other and with computer. AI can monitor heart rates, signal early signs of diabetes, and even predict an individual’s risk for Alzheimer’s. The healthcare industry has been quick to adopt AI, as they are the future assistants to the doctors, helping in diagnosing and treating illnesses, some AI-powered tools have already proven themselves reliable enough for use by consumers daily.

2. Telemedicine Apps

Many healthcare apps are used by physicians and patients worldwide. In addition, a growing number of them can be used on smartphones meaning you don’t necessarily need access to your doctor or hospital to benefit from these technologies. Telemedicine-oriented tools for health monitoring and for exchanging information about medications between doctors and patients. In addition, these tools could prove useful for connecting hospitals with residents who are located remotely but still want access to care at home.

3. A Billing & Coding System and documentation

A billing and coding system can reduce time and money spent. It might even be easier and more eco-friendly than using papers to generate reports.

4. Health Information Exchange (HIE)

HIE is a collaboration between hospitals, health systems, and other healthcare providers to share patient information.

It provides an effective way for doctors to keep track of their patient’s medical histories, helping avoid duplication in testing and care. HIE creates a central hub for your medical records, which makes it easier for the physicians to avoid recording data from each patient you've seen previously.

5. Remote Patient Monitoring

Today, many people carry smartphones, meaning there’s an app for that: Remote patient monitoring lets you remotely transmit data from healthmonitoring devices (like glucose monitors and blood pressure cuffs) right onto your phone or computer. It automatically puts all of your data into easyto-read charts and graphs so you can get a quick view of how you’re doing throughout each day.

6. Electronic Health Records

Health Records

EHRs provide an easy-to-access medical history for patients, allowing them to quickly talk with their healthcare provider about medications or conditions that may affect their visit. They also increase efficiency by enabling providers to share information electronically. EHRs discover how diseases progress over time that may have previously been hidden.

What is the Importance of Digital Health:

1.Speed up and improve doctor’s diagnostic capabilities by better managing information flow as it will help organize the massive amount of information collected so that a patient's health problem becomes visible more quickly.

2.Provide health databases to measure accurately diagnostic errors and reduce the chance of these errors recurring in the future.

3.More convenient delivery as mobile healthy applications, which can fully cover their needs, assist them until help is sent. They are also being used as an adapter with electrocardiogram electrodes to transmit data to detect silent atrial fibrillation, so super dangerous diseases that cost thousands of lives can be easily detected and rapidly treated from the beginning.

4-Entering the long-promised golden age of personalized healthcare. By better understanding an individual’s genetic profile, more effective therapies can be used. In the future, before treating any woman for breast cancer for example, a genetic test could determine what genetic variations are present.

5-Digital health can be a powerful enabler to improve healthcare outcomes in communities of low capacity of healthcare workers and skilled health professionals.

6-Reduce the time and resources required to bring a medicine to the market by allowing thr virtual screening of millions. Digital solutions such as clinical trial simulation, modeling and simulation, computer-assisted trial design, model-based drug development and model-informed drug discovery and development could also begin to replace certain lab experiments.

What are the Advantages of Digital Health?

Digital health offers real opportunities to improve medical outcomes and enhance efficiency.

These technologies can empower consumers to make better-informed decisions about their own health and provide new options for facilitating prevention, early diagnosis of life-threatening diseases, and management of chronic conditions outside of traditional health care settings. Providers and other stakeholders are using digital health technologies in their efforts to:

Reduce inefficiencies.

Improve access.

Reduce costs.

Increase quality.

Make medicine more personalized for patients.

Patients can better manage and track their health and wellness-related activities.

The use of technologies, such as smart phones, social networks, and internet applications providing innovative ways for us to monitor our health and well-being and giving us greater access to information. Together, these advancements are leading to a convergence of people, information, technology, and connectivity to improve health care and health outcomes.

What are the 10 e’s in Digital Health?

1. Efficiency

Digital health increases efficiency in health care, thereby decreasing costs by avoiding duplicative or unnecessary diagnostic or therapeutic interventions, through enhanced communication between health care establishments and patients.

2. Enhancing quality of care

Digital health improves quality of health care provided by allowing comparisons between different health care services.

3. Evidence based

Digital health interventions should be evidence-based in a sense that their effectiveness and efficiency should not be assumed but proven by rigorous scientific evaluation. Much work still has to be done in this area.

4. Empowerment of consumers and patients by making the knowledge bases of medicine and personal electronic records accessible to consumers over the Internet, e-health opens new avenues for patient-centered medicine and enables evidence-based patient choice.

5. Encouragement of a new relationship between the patient and health professional, towards a true partnership, where decisions are made in a shared manner.

6. Education of physicians through online sources (Continuing medical education) and consumers (health education, tailored preventive information for consumers)

7. Enabling information exchange and communication in a standardized way between health care establishments.

8. Extending the scope of health care beyond its conventional boundaries. This is meant in both a geographical sense as well as in a conceptual sense. e-health enables consumers to easily obtain health services online from global providers. These services can range from simple advice to more complex interventions or products such a pharmaceuticals.

9. Ethics

Digital health involves new forms of patient-physician interaction and poses new challenges and threats to ethical issues such as online professional practice, informed consent, privacy and equity issues.

10. Equity

People, who do not have the money, skills, and access to computers and networks, cannot use computers effectively. As a result, these patient populations (which would actually benefit the most from health information) are those who are the least likely to benefit from advances in information technology, unless political measures ensure equitable access for all. The digital divide currently runs between rural vs. urban populations, rich vs. poor, young vs. old. Actually, the ratio for people who do not have an access the Internet is very low roughly 2 %.

In addition to these 10 essential e's, digital health should also be: easy-to-use, entertaining (no-one will use something that is boring!) and exciting eHealth has a goal of providing quality life by uplifting the healthcare system which is not limited to the usage of some Smartphone applications, whereas Digital health has a goal of reaching as many people as possible who need help via the digital channel.

What is the difference between E-health & digital health?

Digital health is a broad concept that includes e-health, m-Health, and telehealth, and incorporates everything from electronic patient records to remote monitoring, connected equipment, and digital therapies, among other things.

What are the Types of digital health ?

The broad scope of digital health includes categories such as mobile health (mHealth), health information technology (IT), wearable devices, telehealth and telemedicine, and personalized medicine.

What is Cyber medicine: telemedicine is the use of electronic information and communications technologies to provide and support health care when distance separates the participants.

Cybermedicine is the science of applying Internet and global networking technologies to the area of medicine and public health, of studying the impact and implications of the Internet and of evaluating opportunities and the challenges in health care.

What is Telemedicine ?

What are the Challenges facing digital health?

Outdated governance and policies: primary care relies on regulations that can ensure high-quality care, patient data protection.

Fragmented landscapes of digital innovation: As care shifts to mobile and virtual provision, either with or without a provider (e.g., via artificial intelligence chatbots), the public and private sectors will need to work together to ensure continuity of care. This is counter to the optimization of services, which often seeks to minimize costs for acute care.

Limited and uneven levels of digital literacy and access: For digital primary care need to be accessible to all. This will require broader and more affordable access to internet and mobile phones and a more widespread capacity to use new tools.

Weak supporting infrastructure: Each technology required strong infrastructure of digital health and connectivity, which in turn rests on interoperable and connected systems (such as health information management systems).

Security

Application of digital health in Egypt

“The National Health Insurance System or the Universal Health Insurance, is a new system approved by the Egyptian Government in 2019. It makes healthcare insurance compulsory for all citizens.

An app that has been making healthcare accessible for all in Egypt is Vezeeta Its founder/CEO Amir Barsoum’s aim is to empower consumers to make more informed healthcare decisions. The app allows users to book online appointments, teleconsultations, doctors’ home visits and can also be used for online ordering and delivery of medications.

Digital health education:

Advocating for digital health access, digital health education and equality for pediatric populations. Improved digital access improves better healthcare access and equality: prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, United Nations experts reported more people had access to cellphones than flushing toilets. During COVID-19 pandemic imposed online education, initially children were reporting sharing phones and running out of monthly data allowances when trying to access online education. UK foundations, charities and campaigns (eg, BBC ‘give a laptop’) supplied computers and devices to children. Mobile networks provided dongles, sims and unlimited data allowances. Schools and council initiatives provided WiFi assistance.