Our world today has witnessed a lot of changes over the past few decades especially in the field of healthcare . The digitalised services to the medical domain has enabled advanced treatment and health monitoring systems in the industry thereby developing a whole sector to assist us.
Digital health – refers to the use of a plethora of health-related technologies, services, and products intended to enhance our health and make healthcare overall more proactive. It is a key term we use for all the concepts that bring information technology and healthcare together. To be very precise, it is a wide concept which is well-designed with digital way of medicine, therapeutic and treatment via telehealth.
Digital medicine – is a narrower field within digital health that involve the technology to improve our health and interventions in its service to support the practice of medicine widely.
Digital therapeutics – As the title itself suggests, it is a digital health subset that employs various hardware and software systems to provide evidence-based therapeutic interventions for patients with different behavioural, mental, and physical conditions. But unlike drugs, digital therapeutic products provide clinically proven results that impact our life conditions. Here let me tell you, this is what separates digital therapeutics from a bunch of other wellness apps and medication reminders which we are usually following. There is a wide array of disorders and diseases affecting our lives that digital therapeutic products cover, which includes obesity, ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), type 2 diabetes, anxiety, depression, congestive heart failure, and many more.
Now, let’s have a look at principles followed by digital therapeutics:
- It produces a software-driven medical intervention for us.
- It uses best practices for product design, creation, deployment, management, and maintenance to provide better service for the users.
- It is validated by appropriate regulatory bodies. The peer group testing experiments and clinically proven statements are provided making it more reliable to us.
Let’s now see the diverse functions of digital therapeutics:
- It suggests a set of preventative health care activities for us.
- It allow us to freely do the tests which are required and incorporate patient privacy and safety measures.
- It provides us a source of information for diagnosis and treatment.
- It collects the tools for monitoring and there by aiming a better treatment.
Let me now give you an idea about the communities that are benefited through digital therapeutics:
- We as patients will receive personalized care and treatment programs which can be accessed from anywhere including remote areas and improves treatment effectiveness.
- Health care providers are another group of people who will get opportunities to monitor patients in real-time, make timely interventions, improve the efficiency of care delivery, and reduce the need for personal visits by managing people with chronic conditions remotely.
- Distributors being significant members in the medical stream are given a chance to keep track of the demand for different drugs regionally and nation-wide, check the usefulness of the drugs, and manage the supply chain more effectively.
- The payers also can reduce the costs related to care activities, increase sales, and improve patient experience and health outcomes.
Now here are some of the common challenges faced by digital services in health care industry:
- Regulatory approval
- Clinical validation.
- Physician and care provider adoption
- Unawareness of digital therapeutics opportunities and options.
- Data privacy
As we all know, every innovation comes with pros and cons. Despite from the fact technical advancements in the medical realm had made our lives easier than ever before, I would also like to suggest that we should use it wisely to have a more secure and sustainable future.