Main Challenges in Digital Healthcare Innovation

Digital healthcare is fundamentally about changing the relationship between doctor and patient and the investment in healthcare and research.

Digital healthcare is fundamentally about changing the relationship between the doctor and the patient, and making healthcare and research in science more accessible. Digital healthcare challenges include:

1. The digital revolution is bringing new ways to access doctors and patients.

2. New technologies will affect how information is shared, and how doctors interact with patients in a way that’s unprecedented.

3. Patients will be able to share their medical information at home with peace of mind, while doctors can access it easily from anywhere on their mobile devices or computers.

4. Medical data will become a global resource available to everyone, enabling people to take control of their health care decisions through smart phones or tablets.

5. Doctors will use new technologies to improve patient-physician interactions while reducing physician-patient barriers by enabling people’s own medical histories to be shared on mobile devices.

Digital Healthcare Is The Future

We will try to do just that by outlining some of the main challenges that need to be faced in order for digital health to take hold in healthcare and make significant progress towards solving those problems.

The first challenge is that there are a lot of different ways “digital” can be used to describe healthcare. It might mean systems or services built on the internet or on software which communicate with each other and with humans (e.g., email, web-based portals) or systems which are connected to data collected from multiple sources such as sensors, machine-based computers and cloud services (e.g., big data).

The second challenge is that there are a lot of different ways “healthcare” can be described (which could include “medical care”, “non-medical care”, even “the arts”). There’s also an ongoing debate over whether healthcare should be defined as physical or mental health.

A third challenge is that the use of digital technology has changed so much over the years that some people simply do not understand its implications for healthcare — especially when they have never experienced it themselves (many people won’t even come close).

For example, if your doctor wants you to refer a patient for surgery right away due to high blood pressure (the patient is clearly in trouble). The question becomes: do we go ahead with surgery now or wait until after a few more weeks? Is it better for us to send them home immediately with no problem and risk further damage from an unexpected problem during their recovery period? Or do we let them sit before our eyes for hours at a time for months? How about when they eventually decide they don’t want the surgery anymore because their vision has deteriorated so much? Will we let them get back on their feet again if we send them home now or will we give them access to one or two glasses? How about at home where they don’t need an operation because there’s no-one else around — will we prescribe them daily medications so they don’t get sick again? The whole process could take days; in fact, several intervention models have been developed which reduce waiting time by 5–10 days on average…

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I was inspired to write this article after my conversation with Prof. Joe Kvedar in my YouTube Channel. I interview Prof. Joe Kvedar, MD — Senior Advisor — MGH Center for Innovation in Digital Healthcare; Professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School; Board Chair at American Telemedicine Association; Author & Thought Leader in Connected Health.

He shared amazing insights on TeleHealth , Digital Healthcare Innovation, and main future predictions in Digital Health. We have also discussed the main challenges always encountered in Healthcare. And to implement TeleHealth more effectively.

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