PERSONA THEME TRENDS WELL-BEING
Digital healthcare
T
NEWSCOPE
RESEARCH
ISSUES
By Dr. Deepti Saini
he population curve is swinging upwards and it highlights the urgency for easy and affordable healthcare for all. Age and disease demographics are changing rapidly with increasing number of senior citizens and the rise in chronic disease incidence rates. When everything from a new car to table tennis balls to designer dresses is available online, why shouldn’t healthcare? A rhetorical question, but one that if answered, would obviously show us that the digitalization of healthcare needs to be prioritized for us to push the growth of the medical industry as well as the quality of health and healthcare of our nation as a whole. The telemedicine boom has already taken off with remote monitors, wearable devices and data processors to augment the conventionally practisced basic medicine. These data processors allow a variety of different applications from the data collected to be efficiently examined, such as 34
Volume 4 | Issue 1 | January-March 2019
patient medical records, surveys, statistics and complaint registers etc. This may tangentially cause the discovery of more efficient methods of accurate diagnosis and improve the planning and allocation of medical resources for the patient and change our definition of primary care. Setting up appointments and accessing
patient records no longer has to be a hassle. WHAT IS DIGITAL HEALTH? Put simply, the digitalisation of healthcare means the integration of technology and robotics into the healthcare field. This is a platform for industrial growth as well as a revolution in the way we treat healthcare. TRACKING HEALTH Patient friendly diagnostic and tracking devices allow patients to monitor their health parameters, like blood sugar levels, blood pressure, etc., much more efficiently. This enables them to be more in-charge of their own well-being. This is not to say that the technology is a replacement of the doctor, but rather an assistant for better medical decisions. The balance between doctor and patient can be less one-sided with the assistance of even their simplistic smartphone. Doctors will no longer have to utilize
