Healthcare systems around the world are being put under increasing strain every year.
Key challenges they face include overburdened medical staff and a steady rise in patients with chronic health conditions that require high levels of care.
Digital health has long been proposed as a solution to both problems, but the adoption of digital health has been spotty in areas.
Although the Covid-19 pandemic has allowed digital health companies to demonstrate the capabilities of their solutions, the question remains as to how the world will shift more permanently towards this new form of healthcare delivery.
IDTechEx recently launched a new report, “Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence 2024-2034: Trends, Opportunities, and Outlook”, covering the status of the digital health market with a focus on healthcare delivery.
Telehealth and remote patient monitoring (RPM) can be key to helping healthcare systems optimise the deployment of their medical staff. Benefits range from enabling better coverage of skills across several locations to higher levels of care within a single location but with fewer staff.
While telehealth can be as simple as a phone or video conversation between a patient and their doctor, developments in medical sensors are advancing the range of health conditions that can be monitored from home via RPM.
Companies developing patient monitoring hardware and programs are at varying stages of commercialisation, ranging from clinical trials and projects to start-ups that major medical device players have acquired.
IDTechEx report on digital health finds that a technology trend enabling the rise of RPM is the continuing improvement of consumer wearable technology and the movement toward medical applications.
Wearable technology provides continuous monitoring of health conditions in an unobtrusive form factor, with the potential to provide significant value to healthcare systems up to the point of enabling physicians to intervene with early diagnosis and even preventative healthcare.
The line between consumer devices and medical devices is continuing to blur, with consumer wearable devices offering an increasing number of highly relevant health sensing capabilities and medical devices seeking out additional consumer wellness applications amongst healthy populations.
Finally, the key to digital health is software. Significant progress has been made in bringing software as a medical device (SaMD) to market, with several digital therapies receiving regulatory approval and reimbursement worldwide.
Key areas for SaMD are mental and behavioral health. With the ability to drive healthy behaviors, digital health apps are also applicable to managing chronic conditions and improving wellbeing.
A separate type of SaMD that has emerged is the use of image recognition AI for application on medical imaging for diagnostics. The use of software has multiple benefits, including both helping overburdened doctors, as well as enabling early diagnosis.