What does the digital health future look like?

by

Gavin Bashar, UK MD at Tunstall Healthcare, discusses digital health and what the future holds for connected solutions.

The possibility of revolutionising the health, housing and social care system through digital health still exists. But to achieve this, providers will need to carefully manage a wide array of bureaucracy and organisational challenges to understand what citizens need, and then deliver excellent services that embrace digital solutions at their heart.

Pressures already in the system, and projections of rising demand for services from an ageing population for the foreseeable future, means technology will need to play an increasingly important role in helping to expand the capacity of the system to meet these growing challenges.

The benefits of advanced telehealth and connected solutions

As demands continue to rise due to the increasing number of people with chronic and complex conditions such as COPD, heart disease and diabetes, new ways of working must be found to deliver care that is safe and efficient, while reducing reliance on hospital and institutional-based care.

As well as enabling people to remain safe at home, digital health solutions also help people to become more knowledgeable about their condition and the effects of their behaviours, whilst providing alternative healthcare pathways. By using advanced telehealth solutions, exacerbations can be detected at an earlier stage, avoiding more complex interventions, and reducing the need for home visits, GP appointments and hospital admissions.

This facilitates caseload management and helps care to be targeted where it is needed most; reducing cost, improving outcomes and enhancing the patient experience.

Digital health in practice

Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust’s children’s eating disorder service offers treatment and support to children over the age of 11 with a range of eating disorders.

The normal care pathway includes children attending clinics for monitoring of their vital signs and symptoms. Due to restrictions in place during the pandemic and the risks to patients, an alternative approach was needed.

RPM was introduced to enable clinicians to support patients in their own homes. A special health interview was developed based on the Junior MaRSiPAN (Management of Really Sick Patients with Anorexia Nervosa) risk assessment framework.

Once a week, patients used devices in their home to take their vital signs and answer symptom-related questions. The information is collected via an app on the patient’s smart device and automatically uploaded, where any breaches of parameters set for individual patients raise an alert on the system.

Clinicians can log in to a secure portal to view a colour coded dashboard which prioritises patients according to the need for intervention. Individual patient’s readings can also be viewed over time to monitor their progress.

What does the future hold for digital health?

To transform care delivery through digital and connected devices, we need to be aware of upcoming trends and what the future holds for digital health within care delivery. 

Since the pandemic, we have continued to see the growth of virtual wards, and we’re expecting to see them become even more of a focus. Most of the population would rather receive care in the comfort of their own homes, and virtual wards will enable this. A recent study coordinated by the NIHR and researchers from the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford found that caring for vulnerable, older people at home can improve patient outcomes.

The consumer health and wellness market is big business, with more people than ever before becoming invested and engaged in the monitoring of their physical and mental health. This means that consumers are becoming increasingly technologically savvy and understanding of the benefits of digital devices and how to use them. This digital upskilling of the nation will encourage the integration of readily available consumer devices within clinical practices and care delivery, to engage with citizens and support improved health outcomes.

Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) are moving to ensure our services can facilitate efficient data-led decision making. Through this, we will see more cohesion and improved data gathering from technology providers and data companies. This will help to support clinicians and other frontline workers in their goals of improving the health outcomes of our population. Ultimately, effective data gathering, and extrapolation will result in improved information and insight which can then be used to influence decision making in healthcare.