Digital health
Digital health is a discipline that includes digital care programs, technologies with health, healthcare, living, and society to enhance the efficiency of healthcare delivery and to make medicine more personalized and precise. It uses information and communication technologies to facilitate understanding of health problems and challenges faced by people receiving medical treatment and social prescribing in more personalised and precise ways. The definitions of digital health and its remits overlap in many ways with those of health and medical informatics.
Worldwide adoption of electronic medical records has been on the rise since 1990. Digital health is a multi-disciplinary domain involving many stakeholders, including clinicians, researchers and scientists with a wide range of expertise in healthcare, engineering, social sciences, public health, health economics and data management.
Digital health technologies include both hardware and software solutions and services, including telemedicine, wearable devices, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Generally, digital health interconnects health systems to improve the use of computational technologies, smart devices, computational analysis techniques, and communication media to aid healthcare professionals and their patients manage illnesses and health risks, as well as promote health and wellbeing.
Although digital health platforms enable rapid and inexpensive communications, critics warn against potential privacy violations of personal health data and the role digital health could play in increasing the health and digital divide between social majority and minority groups, possibly leading to mistrust and hesitancy to use digital health systems.
Elements
The prominence of Digital health in the past century has culminated for the emergence of three reasons, stated by both Professor John Powell and Professor Theodoros N Arvanitis "the development of new technologies... and also trends towards smart, wearable and pervasive technologies; the need for health services to find new approaches to addressing the demands of an ageing population... and the role of the empowered patient and the shift in models of health service delivery towards patient-centred care, and patient-led care." These three points have directed and motivated the rise in the elements that play a crucial role in the creation of Digital health care services.Primary Care Services
The first group of these services is known as primary care services in the domain of digital health. These services include wireless medical devices that utilize technology such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, as well as applications on mobile devices that encourage the betterment of an individual's health as well as applications that promote overall general wellness. For example, researchers developed a digital service to help elderly people with balance disorder and risk of falling. As prominent sociologist Deborah Lupton states, "Health promoters have experimented with using text messages, social media sites and apps to disseminate information about preventive health, collect data about people's health-related behaviours and attempt to 'nudge' members of target groups to change their behaviour in the interests of their health." In other words, Lupton states that various media technologies that can be found on mobile devices are being utilized to try and better certain groups' behaviors in concern with digital health.Acute Care Services
The second group of these services is known as acute care in the digital health domain. These services include telemedicine which is defined as handling patients over some sort of streaming device and is targeted towards areas where the population is more widely scattered, medical devices that incorporate different aspects of software otherwise known as SaMD, and examples of these devices are pacemakers. The final example of acute care services is the 'interoperability' of 'Health IT, Cybersecurity, and Medical Devices', Health IT is how the electronic database stores, processes, and analyses personal health information and how this information can be utilized by medical personnel and organizations around the world of easier access of information, Cybersecurity which then plays into the storing of personal health information in how this information is secured and protected in the interest of personal safety of the individuals whose information is being stored, and Medical Devices that are able to communicate within each other to better care for a patient by transmitting what needs to be done on one machine to another. Sociologist Deborah Lupton states "However, members of some social groups are currently excluded from full participation in the digital health ecosystem. Mechanisms for facilitating further consultation between the various stakeholders involved in digital health, including patients and carers, need to be established. The rights and responsibilities of the different stakeholders involved in connected digital health also need to be better identified and highlighted. At the same time, personal data privacy and security need protection." Lupton concludes that despite the innovation of various elements in this digital health area, there are still multiple issues that need to be organized and dealt with for the continuation of the revolution of Digital Health.Other Digital Health Elements
The rest of the elements of Digital health that do not fall so squarely into acute or primary care services are listed as the transmission of medical education and information between practitioners and researchers through the utilization of digital technologies and applications that can be employed by doctors for risk-assessment regarding patients. Devices that can be utilized for the improvement and management of bodily purposes as well as the encouragement of the education of digital health to the public. There are also patient-based applications that can be utilized to share information by individual patients as well as encourage the usage of drug trials. The tracking of outbreaks of disease by the use of mass media that social media has developed has also come about through Digital Health. Finally the recording of the environment around sensor devices that are being utilized for the betterment of the community.Technologies
Digital health technologies come in many different forms and extend into various parts of healthcare. As new technologies develop, digital health, as a field, respectively transforms. The three most popular domains of digital health technologies include telemedicine, wearable technologies, and augmented and virtual reality. Telemedicine is how physicians treat patients remotely and the different technologies needed to make the process more efficient and faster. The other main side of digital health is data collection and how to provide on-demand medical information for patients, which gave rise to wearables. Wearable technologies hold the promise of bringing personalized data and health-related tracking to all users. In terms of digitized treatment, augmented and virtual reality can create personalized regimens for patients that can be repeated and tailored to treat many conditions.In fact some of these technologies are being propelled by the startup space, which has been followed via Internet or online media sources such as podcasts on digital health entrepreneurs. The National Institute for Health and Care Research has published a review of research on how digital health technologies can help manage health conditions.