i n terviews
Digital health needs to be embedded in the conception of the health system We talked with Denise Silber, founder of Doctors 2.0 & You and a global thought leader, about the present and future of digital health innovations and ethics. Learn why Denise hopes these technologies can make healthcare more human.
What are your biggest hopes regarding digital health?
This is a tough question because high hopes for digital health or eHealth have been expressed for so many years by so many people. My hope is that digital health can be used to act on priorities like reducing medical error and fraud, providing equal access to quality care., and facilitating the patient-physician relationship. Unfortunately, at the same time, not all about digital is positive. Digital systems can introduce errors. Hackers target health data. Many doctors spend more time on electronic medical records than on communicating with the patient. Silicon Valley is no longer as highly regarded, etc. Which issues of technological transformation should be discussed more often?
Here are some of the main ones. – The time required to do clinical trials and satisfy regulatory requirements versus the life cycle of the technology;
– The excess of choice that comes from too many innovations, both complicating interoperability and wasting resources; – The non-alignment of incentives amongst the different stakeholders which slows down the distribution of innovation; – Our difficulty in developing a truly new vision for healthcare. If I take an example from consumer products, a well-funded startup called Quibi has a new vision for culture: that while cinema and tv have each generated their media (films and tv shows), smartphones have not. So they’re developing a new medium for smartphones, the short-form video that can be watched vertically and horizontally. Entertainment is not as complex or critical to us as healthcare, but it’s interesting to note that this company proposes a new vision. What is “ethical digital innovation” in healthcare?
Ethical digital innovation is, so far, a dream goal, as is truly ethical healthcare. But we are trying hard to achieve that. Such an innovation would be: – conceived for the benefit of the patient, – accessible to all patients, – fully personalized, – based on representative data, – carbon-neutral. And let’s add the five principles cited in a Nature publication and which are embedded in my first criterion “for the benefit of the patient”: transparency, justice
and fairness, non-maleficence, responsibility, and privacy. What’s your opinion about the market of wearables today?
The wearables market is growing and currently led by devices that track fitness and wellbeing, such as watches, which account for around half the market. Google purchased Fitbit in November 2019, after previously purchasing Fossil for its smartwatch technology. Google’s actions are a solid, short-term sign of potential, although Google can withdraw in the future as easily as it entered. Sleep tracking is also growing. Both fitness and sleep are essential to preventive health. On the medical side, interest in the EKG-related applications of connected objects has matured, although the value of the identification of largescale, symptomless cardiac irregularities has not been demonstrated. Cardiology lends itself particularly to tracking, and there are so many medical segments with connected objects that we can’t mention them all here! Such listings are the bread and butter of the companies that sell market research reports! Could you please name one innovation that interested you recently?
I was excited to see Medwand receive various awards at CES 2020. Medwand, which was developed by a physician, is like a StarTrek tricorder but with seven tools that fit in your palm and enables a physician to “examine” a patient anywhere in the world. Medwand
OSOZ World 2020
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