In a Brand article from Forbes.com Digital Health Offers Disruptive Potential for Diabetes the author touches on a lot of great points of how digital health can benefit the diabetes industry.
I think that digital health can help just about any disease state, but since diabetes is my thing, we will stick with that.
The primary part of this article that I found intriguing was breaking down the Diabetes Patient Journey, as they call it in this article.
This journey consists of the following stages:
1. Awareness
2. Diagnosis
3. Treatment
4. Self-Management
There are not many examples given as to how digital health can help in all four of these stages, but I have a few ideas to add to it.
Awareness
As much as I want to think that digital health can really help the awareness aspect, I’m not 100% sure how it can. I mean, let’s be real, it obviously can help because digital health is just where the future is.
I think that one area digital health can help with the awareness is with a quick questionnaire on an iPad. Depending on what answers you provide, the AI (artificial intelligence) can prompt the next set of questions. If this occurs in every appointment, then it can be brought up to the doctor’s attention.
Why the iPad instead of just the normal papers that are filled out? Sometimes, I mark things on questionnaire sheets, just to see if I’m asked about it. When I’m not, then I know it wasn’t even looked at, which is obviously not good.
With the iPad, then it can alert you to bring up to the doctor and also be sent to your EHR (electronic health record)
Diagnosis
Diagnosis is an extremely difficult time for the person being diagnosed and the family. There are so many questions flying around. Can I eat this? Can I do this? How do I do this? What does this mean? A needle in my stomach? By myself? What?
Self-Management / Treatment
I think that the Self-Management and Treatment are basically the same thing. Treatment, I believe, means treatment in the hospital or inside the doctor’s office. I personally feel that ties in directly to self-management. Your care mixed with your doctor’s care is your overall treatment.
This is the area that I think there is already a lot of digital health companies playing. In fact, there may be too many apps. Which, there can’t be too many because each person may like a different feature of all the apps.
I think that where digital health companies can improve is first speaking with the patients and figuring out exactly what they need an app or VR/AR to solve. Too many times companies create apps that just don’t do anything much more special than the other 99 apps. So we have another app that just does the same ole thing as the others.
Where would you like to see advancements in digital health?
I think that utilizing digital health to help educate patients and to allow doctors to have virtual visits with their patients would be a great step in the right direction. I know this is currently happening, but it’s not the norm and it’s definitely a small amount of physicians who are offering this service.
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