Digital Health Care Echo System : The New Era of Health Care Services
A digital healthcare ecosystem is an infrastructure that supports the shift from an organization-centric to a patient-centric model of delivering healthcare services using digital platforms. The primary goal of this system is to encourage cross-organizational, multidisciplinary, and collaborative healthcare delivery
How Has Technology Changed Healthcare Practice?
Technology has acted as a driving force in healthcare, mainly over the past decade. A report from NCBI suggested that by 2020, more than 40% of IoT technology will be health-related. But although the change is enormous, it might not be visible to everyone. In this section, we’ll take a quick look at how technology has changed the healthcare practice for both patients and healthcare providers.
a. Improved access to treatment
Increased accessibility of treatment is arguably the most tangible benefits of technology in healthcare. Advancements in telehealth and e-pharmacies have opened ways for providers to offer services on a large scale. The patients also benefit from these developments as they can receive the highest quality treatment anytime and anywhere.
b. Improved treatment efficacy and care
Emerging technology in healthcare has made patient care safer, efficient, and more reliable. Doctors and nurses can use devices to record and share critical patient data in real-time. This includes lab results, X-rays, and other vital patient data that can be crucial to providing effective patient care. Hospitals are also using robot technology to deliver accurate surgical treatments. In 2018, 15.1% of all surgeries were robot-assisted, compared with only 1.8% in 2012.
c. Use of software to improve healthcare
Specific software programs are being developed to classify illnesses and their symptoms into organized, easy-to-access databases. These programs allow health professionals to efficiently track and identify patient illnesses and provide them with the best possible care.
Software is also playing a key role in improving the operational efficiency of hospitals and clinics. Hospital management platforms, for example, reduce paperwork and other recurring tasks. Therefore, medical facilities are able to center their focus on providing quality healthcare services.
Healthcare used to be much easier. The “ecosystem” consisted of you—the patient—and your doctor, the provider. If you needed medical attention or required a hospital stay, your doctor was in charge of coordinating your care.
Data driven health ecosystems are a big part of the solution, but what is needed is not necessarily technological.
Healthcare works best when all stakeholders are aligned around a proactive patient, within an ecosystem that supports success. In an ideal healthcare system interrelated consumer, providers, payers, government agencies, and others work together as a community centered around patient care: our care
And with total transparency into costs and shared, open access to the health information we need, healthcare consumer like us can make informed decisions to get the best care for ourselves and our families.
Unfortunately, that’s not the world we’ve been living in.
Our current healthcare system has grown increasingly complicated over decades of growth, changes, and regulation. And too often there is a disconnect among those who populate it. The key players often have conflicting goals that make it impossible for them to unite to serve each our unique needs, preferences and values.
Often, it’s not that they don’t want to work together to provide the best patient care. Our complex healthcare industry simply isn’t set up to enable coordinated care at a reasonable cost that allows patients to call the shots.
We have the ability to work towards efficiently offering the services and knowledge that people need in one place, what we refer to as “digital ecosystems.” Pandemic-specific digital ecosystems will make adaptations and virus spread avoidance easier and more efficient, allowing for smart and safe resumption of many “normal” activities and tasks in public. We see the beginnings of digital ecosystems employed in this manner – for example, in China, there have been great examples of cross sector collaboration in the development of their ecosystems. WeChat and Alipay both have begun to include links to relevant services, including e-medicine (telemedicine services, including counselling), official government statistics and e-commerce so that people can buy sanitizer and masks through their preferred partners (Grover, 2020).
While countries in Europe, like Italy and Spain, enacted extreme lockdowns to counter massive outbreaks of the virus, some countries in Asia like South Korea enjoyed comparatively more freedom whilst undergoing containment measures to try and control the virus. From the above figure we can see that there was even an increase of activity in parks in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. These countries’ use of contact tracing in particular, which has been hailed as the crown jewel of defence efforts against the virus, was an important part of their strategy, but other efforts such as temperature screenings and mass testings were also implemented on a wide scale (New Yorker, 2020).
As is clear by the strategies employed in countries like South Korea, myriad applications in the medical, behavioural and mobility IoT space already exist that would be useful in the fight against the spread of COVID-19. These applications, brought together and appropriately regulated, would deliver greatly enhanced data value for individuals and would allow official bodies to deliver life-saving services.
As mentioned above, digital ecosystems would be especially beneficial in prevention efforts like contact tracing. In addition, they would be helpful in self-diagnosis. According to a recent WHO study, medical parameters such as raised heart rate, increased respiratory rate, and reduced oxygen saturation were typically found in COVID-19 patients (WHO, 2020). These indicators are easy to self-monitor with tools we have available today, and early identification of critical levels and prediction of vital parameter changes would allow us to swiftly take appropriate action.
In the case of an infected patient, digital platforms and technology are also promising. In the illustration, each circle shows the type of care necessary for the infection stage, e.g. decentralised mobile care vs. the next stage of home & virtual care. They’re broken up by the technological interventions that either enable management or healing, i.e. ‘symptom detection’ or ‘diagnostic testing’. A health ecosystem should allow patient flow to be as seamless as suggested in the diagram: all components should work together for the recovery of the patient, preventing an unnecessarily complex combination of platforms and services.