The healthcare industry has undergone a Tsunami of disruption and challenges remain despite the pandemic being in the rearview. From pressure on costs, a nursing shortage, and the impact of delayed care during COVID, uncertainty is now the new normal. As the industry strives to enhance outcomes, digital healthcare continues to gather momentum with the goal of improving efficiency and shifting from hospital-centric to making medicine more personalized and precise.
Innovations, including AI, digital therapeutics, and continuous sensors, have the potential to revolutionize disease prediction, diagnostics, and treatment, leading to better healthcare. From ambient signatures to implants and consumer wearables, there is an array of data to harness, and sharing this information is vital. This is fueling a technology arms race as the industry strives to usher in a new era of preventative health.
Powered by these innovations, the global digital health market is predicted to be worth $939 Billion by 2032. However, there are some underlying issues to navigate before personalized healthcare at scale can be realized:
- Interoperability
Consumer wearables and other connected devices are creating a wave of health-related data, and the success of personalized care depends on the interoperability ecosystem. Breaking down silos and ensuring seamless integration will improve diagnostics and reduce costs, and open standards are key to better healthcare for everyone.
Addressing these problems requires implementing a simplified and standardized infrastructure for providers, researchers, insurers, patients, and public health agencies. This would build on the existing state and regional health information exchanges that facilitate the secure transmission of millions of medical documents today. The ability to share real-time data is vital and leads to better treatment and patient outcomes. Analytic interoperability across data standards is a foundational element of delivering more personalized and predictive healthcare. What’s more, the US government is exploring ways to impose significant financial penalties on health organizations that block information sharing.
- Regulatory Landscape
HIPAA and the HITECT Act ensure that patients’ personal information is secure. However, as wearables and implantable devices become more pervasive, so do cybersecurity concerns. For example, if the device transmits data to the individual’s smartphone and it’s breached, it could result in:
- the device triggering unnecessary treatment or an action that may harm the individual
- an entry point to the hospital network that could be exploited
- add to the growing threat from ransomware that is plaguing the healthcare industry
Therefore, it’s vital to ensure that guardrails are in place to prevent these and other security vulnerabilities. Government oversight and more regulation are vital to ensure data is protected and shared safely and securely in order to accelerate the adoption of digital healthcare.
- Data: Privacy & Trust
The explosion in connected devices such as heart rate monitors, pulse oximeters, electrocardiographs, and continuous glucose monitors creates new data streams. The data provides insights that will support better personalized therapeutic care; however, building trust in the data and ensuring privacy and security standards are critical.
To help address concerns, the FDA has implemented cybersecurity guidance for medical devices. However, many think the framework doesn’t go far enough. Fostering trust between all parties is an integral part of advancing digital health.
As digital therapeutics continues to expand, it has the potential to change how diseases progress and help rebuild neural connections within the brain. Doctors will have data telling them precisely what the patient is doing rather than relying on what they say, which will drive up efficiency and effectiveness. However, as these solutions blur the lines between consumer and health products, they will magnify trust and privacy concerns.
Doubling Down on Digital
Delivering better holistic healthcare more efficiently will require intelligent technologies to address the issues stated above. The fusion of AI and ML with digital twin solutions will provide a way to model, scenario plan, and predict outcomes. However, to deliver personalized care, intelligent digital twins require interoperable real-time data to model, assess, gain insight, and take effective action. The future of healthcare will include tapping into various information streams and biomarkers and, ultimately, creating digital individuals to test and evaluate treatment plans.
Companies are already using virtual patients to assess drug efficacy before moving to human trials. Digital simulations help identify issues early in the development cycle, saving significant time and money. The technology can model medical devices and patients and predict how the treatments would work. While it may seem futuristic, these initiatives are already well underway with innovations, including simulating a human heart.
The Digital Imperative
The quest to shift from one size fits all to personalized and preventative healthcare is a global imperative. Digital healthcare has the ability to transform our lives in a multitude of ways, from improved detection and diagnosis to tailored treatments and preventative measures. In addition, it will drive efficiency gains and outcomes. However, there are roadblocks to overcome before it comes to fruition. But with lifespans in the US decreasing for the second consecutive year, there is a pressing moral directive to pivot to predictive and therapeutic health.
Janet Ooi
Janet Ooi is Digital Healthcare Solutions Manager at Keysight Technologies.
