What the Future of Digital Health Looks Like in 2020

Our healthcare system is complex, making it resistant to large-scale sweeping changes. As shown by the COVID-19 pandemic, many hospitals worldwide are having a difficult time treating those who come in with symptoms. While there are plenty of cases of COVID-19 that are mild and do not require treatment from a hospital, those with more severe symptoms, such as high-grade fevers, difficulty breathing, and pneumonia are overrunning the hospitals. This has caused there to be a shortage in critical-care beds, respiratory ventilators, and protective gear like masks, gloves, and coveralls for healthcare workers. This has shown us that the advancement of digital systems must make a major impact this year on how we view our health, how our medical records are managed, and how we receive education in health matters. It is proposed that telemedicine, an increase in female leaders within the industry, and wearable devices will take front and centre this year.

• Telemedicine Will Become the Preferred Healthcare Model by Many: The initial push for telemedicine among the healthcare community was to provide healthcare access to patients who were located in remote regions of the world. With the effects of the COVID-19 virus, it is now a necessity to connect everyone to healthcare practitioners from remote locations and local neighbourhoods alike. This is to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus from and to hospitals and to keep the influx of patients manageable. This push has brought with it billions of dollars in revenue, as the demand for healthcare access has trumped the need for human interactions with providers.
• FemTech Will Continue to Rise & Enhance How Women Are Treated: Digital health solutions have historically been dominated by male-centred venture capitalist firms; which struggled to find digital health solutions that worked for women. Now, with the rise of more females within venture capitalist firms, we are seeing more digital health products come to life that revolves around women-specific health issues and reproductive healthcare.
• Personalization Will Revitalize Wearable Health Technology: Mobile health applications have a powerful impact on how consumers interact with and engage in their own health. While these applications have given us easier access to tracking our symptoms, cataloguing our data, and becoming more aware of our physical and mental well-being, they struggle to retain users. Take Fitbit for instance, it was all the craze a few years ago with hundreds of thousands of people purchasing these fitness trackers. Nowadays, while they are still a top health wearable, you don’t see them being talked about as much. Why? They lack the personalization that mobile health applications need to retain and attract new users. This is why weight loss programs with hand-tailored workouts and applications for managing specific chronic diseases do much better. If companies can include personalization into their wearable tech, the industry will be revitalized.
• We Will See an Increase in Medical Artificial Intelligence: Chatbots will be used to help patients manage their chronic conditions, and machine learning can be used to diagnose real-time health events like heart attacks. Artificial intelligence can be used to identify patterns in an individual’s medical history, collect medical data in a discreet manner, and provide recommendations for providers, doctors, and medicine. However, medical data will be subject to legal challenges and therefore the growth of medical artificial intelligence will be slower than other digital health trends.
• Blockchain Can Eliminate Healthcare Fraud: With clinical trials, data can be recorded in real-time, leaving no time for the data to be tampered with and therefore eliminating potential fraud. Blockchain can also keep track of the entire manufacturing process of individual drug lines, recording transactions, tracking them, time stamping them, as they move through the pharmaceutical industry. Finally, billing inaccuracies that lead to fraud can be addressed as a decentralized record can be used to help process payment and prevent forge transactions.

A sudden rise of technologies like Custom Healthcare App development, IoT Technology, Wearable devices, Artificial Intelligence and many more inventions & innovations have decided how the Digital Health looks like in 2020. To know more about how Digital Health helps in boosting up your business and what types of services and solutions are provided in the Health and Wellness Industry by Let’s Nurture, feel free to contact us.