Want to See the Future of Digital Health Tools?
Today, in the era of continuous innovations, tech parks, and solutions for various industry needs, people daily work on introducing more automated approaches to replace routine and hard-to-cope tasks. For instance, you can agree that with the help of a modern smartphone, you can literally proceed with smart home automation. With the heating systems, you can both provide your household with hot water and electricity. When it comes to the medical and pharmaceutical industries, there is even more potential to reduce the pressure from the experts.
Unfortunately, exactly the pandemic accelerated the growing need for digital health tools. Some are still ongoing trials, and constructions, while other tools are easily integrated into health facilities, and yield fruits. Today, we are going to cover some of the future digital health tools.
What Digital Health Stands for?
To start with, digital health is how accomplished groups of people (health industry) process and use the data to improve patients’ care. It may involve the overall provision of healthcare services to boost one’s care, and the assistance of digital solutions to make it all faster and effective. For example, referring again to the COVID-19. Due to huge delays in providing care to all the affected patients, healthcare providers turned to the teleconference. It helped them to provide consultations, diagnoses, and necessary treatments with prescriptions. It means that they could be accessed not only on-spot facilities but also virtually. You could enter the website of the pharmacy or a clinic, and request virtual consultations on your demanded drugs.
Then, such virtual digital systems greatly helped to reduce the spread of the virus because experts avoided face-to-face communications with the patients. As you may guess, there appeared numerous concerns regarding their personal data and the efficacy of such care. Some were scared to share their medical history online, while others were concerned about the right prescriptions for them.
Other digital health tools of today can be referred to as Apple Watch and Fitbit. You are most likely to wear one of those tools without even knowing their full potential. Yet, they are great for improving one’s fitness routine, losing weight, and just normalizing the heart rate or better to say control its normal readings.
Another look at such tools can be gained by relying on Germany. In 2019, the German government passed the Digital Health Care Act which stood for a law catalyzing the full digitalization of the healthcare system. To not go too deep into details, the government wanted to introduce prescribable applications which involved SaaS functionality. It particularly concerned the Fast-Track Process app. It was designed to provide a standard care environment for both health workers and manufacturers to evaluate better the pricing/management policies per medication.
A 100% future of digital health tools is also related to AI or Artificial Intelligence solutions. Today, it is already implemented in care. For example, oncologists can detect cancer earlier, and prescribe the right treatment to prevent the major outcomes of such diseases. Then, AI may greatly assist medical workers in providing the right diagnosis with a reduced risk for misreading the medical tests. In the near future, we are most likely to see some robot doctors like in old good movies, however, it now seems fantastic. Yet, the biggest goal relied on developing AI healthcare tools is to help doctors find the cure for most diseases that cannot be cured now.
Finally, there are expected to appear digital health tools aimed at boosting one’s nutritional health. Today, the specialists focus on nutrigenomics that stands for the relationship between diet, gene expression, nutrients, and how they all can cater to the prevention of diet-related diseases. For example, how you can prevent diabetes or heart issues. You can now find companies that offer a service where you can send them your blood sample for gene analysis. Within a few weeks, you will see the results on your genetic profile, and access a program from a nutritionist that will help you avoid health conditions. Otherwise, you can always send the blood samples for other tests, and receive a detailed digital consultation on your predispositions to particular diseases. Yet, today, you have to be careful with such services since many frauds may rig you.
All in all, the future of digital health tools is reserved for better diagnosis and prevention of healthcare conditions. In terms of health facilities, the focus goes on the better prescription of medications, and treatments for patients. Finally, you should definitely expect something from such a giant as Apple that already promises lots of potential with their Apple Watch to have better control of your health.