On course to surpass 650 billion in global market value by 2025, digital health is a bullet train barreling toward success. It has become quite the force to be reckoned with, transforming how care facilities operate, in addition to how patients receive care and how physicians go about providing it. Many digital health solutions today incorporate the latest technologies such as artificial intelligence, the combination of which is changing care and vastly upgrading health outcomes. Today, we’ll discuss just how digital health solutions make this possible. In particular, we’ll uncover some of the ways these innovative programs are altering the very basics of care and elevating medical outcomes as well.
Digital Health Levels the Playing Field for Medical Equity
Health equity involves ensuring equal opportunities for everyone in health care. It eliminates individual shortcomings that often stand in the way, hindering all patients from achieving their full health potential.
Attaining equity in healthcare remains one of the top goals across several healthcare systems around the world. Yet, it remains an elusive one. Some of the factors that contribute to healthcare inequity encompass:
- Shortages of environmental resources
- Uneven economic abilities
- Unequal allocation of political resources
Social determinants of health in particular have contributed greatly towards health disparity. This includes but isn’t limited to factors such as poor awareness and unequal healthcare access.
Digital health is an especially viable solution for addressing social determinants that contribute to healthcare disparities. While we must admit, a lot more needs to be done in terms of political and institutional reforms, digital health programs are critical for enacting all-inclusive healthcare.
By ensuring easier and more convenient healthcare access, digital health is already making strides to bridge the equity gaps. This ready access goes a long way to bringing into the picture minorities or groups that have historically endured marginalization.
Additionally, its ability to personalize care down to individual patient needs also further helps the cause. All in all, digital health is providing opportunities to further equity in medical care.
Supporting Diagnostic Accuracy with Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence and digital health have also become the perfect technological combination in healthcare. With digital health solutions often entailing a lot of big data, machine learning algorithms have become quite the revelation in terms of unraveling all that information and providing insights for physicians.
AI-driven virtual care solutions continue to gain preference in the medical world. A 2022 FHI report substantiates this trend, indicating that 6 in 10 decision-makers in care facilities consider it vital to invest in artificial intelligence.
Paired with AI, modern digital health solutions work to limit human involvement, with man-made errors playing quite a significant part in medical errors. These trained models can analyze patient images, biometrics, and reports, picking out patterns that assist in not just disease identification but possibly even prediction as well. As a result, AI-driven digital health programs also ensure the transformation of healthcare systems from a reactive to a proactive approach.
Digital Health is Improving Outcomes through Personalization
It’s a widely known fact that personalization is a key driver of positive health outcomes in healthcare. When care is highly bespoke, there’s a much better understanding in terms of how patients will react to:
- Treatment plans
- Medications
- Lifestyle changes, etc
Consequently, treatment plans tend to be highly effective, thus increasing the chances of the desired outcome.
Digital health technologies enable comprehensive personalization in healthcare. They allow providers to move away from blanket-fit treatments, geared at addressing the needs of a particular patient group in similar shoes, to addressing healthcare needs at an individual level.
Standardization has long been the way to go until now. The advent of digital health ensures better and more advanced, real-time data tracking for the individual, helping to uncover highly specific physiological anomalies. Physicians can keep tabs on extensive health data points and even specific preferences and behaviors.
Digital Health also Improves Engagement for Superior Outcomes
Patient engagement is another crucial aspect that dictates the direction of health outcomes. Disengaged patients tend to become a liability, most notably due to poor adherence to medication or treatment.
Digital health solutions allow for excellent follow-through and generally improve patient engagement in the following ways:
- By getting patients heavily involved- Digital health enables patients to interact with their data, track symptoms, and maintain connectivity with their health via patient portals.
- By strengthening physician-patient interactions – These technologies also allow for seamless communication between care provider and recipient, thus enhancing patient education
- By supporting self-management – Digital health solutions essentially arm patients with the know-how and tools to manage their conditions
When patients take on more active roles in the care process, health outcomes also improve as well.
However, the benefits of better patient engagement reverberate far beyond simplifying and improving health outcomes for an individual. Its improvement also ensures much more efficient resource utilization, thus playing a role in ensuring more sustainable healthcare systems across the globe.
Bringing Hospital-Level Care Into the Patient’s Home
In 2023, digital health is enabling patients to receive the same quality of care that they would get at a hospital, right within the comfort of their living rooms. This approach has enabled care-at-home programs which incorporate a mix of hybrid care solutions, entailing:
- In-person visits
- Remote monitoring
- e-consultations
- Telehealth and more
As a result, there’s a transformation toward more decentralized care delivery models, which have facilitated the better care of patients suffering from grave long-term illnesses such as cancer and high blood pressure.
With decentralization, comes another cascading advantage- a much lower strain on healthcare systems. When the burden on healthcare systems reduces, clinical workflows enjoy more breathing space and become more efficient and accurate.
Digital Health is Transforming Lives & Care Systems
Digital health solutions are transforming healthcare in exciting ways. These technologies are pushing the agenda for medical equity while improving diagnostic accuracy and enabling personalization down to a tee. Its many upsides have ensured digital health continues to gain more admirers in medical circles, with one Statista survey finding that approximately 8 in 10 healthcare professionals vouch for digital health as a route to improving patient outcomes. Digital health is touching lives and changing healthcare. Make it part of your facility’s toolset today by turning to Aura Health for the best-in-class digital health services.
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