Digital health adoption stalled prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but recent momentum signals change

A Synopsis

On September 1st 2020, Healthcare Finance published an interesting article titled “Digital health adoption stalled prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but recent momentum signals change”.

The article discusses the forced use of digital health services during the health crisis. Whilst barriers remain, an opportunity for provider adoption is there. It mentions the consumer attitudes and difficulty integrating new tools and services in today clinical workflows, as the main factors that could drive or stall progress on digital health. However, many patients’ positive experience during the pandemic with more personalised and quicker access to healthcare have regained patients’ trust on health care providers and opened doors to digital health adoption.

Initial Thoughts

The resistance against digital health and the barriers that have overshadowed its potential for many years have had an unexpected turn. Against all odds, an extreme living situation as a result of COVID-19, has helped us overcome some barriers that healthcare professionals, governors and patients had against digital health for many years. The situation has given them no choice but to undertake it and benefit from it.

This article highlights the willingness of patients to continue using virtual healthcare upon their positive recent experiences. Although, it does not comment on how to make this willingness sustainable.

In the UK, different stakeholders have embraced digital health in different ways over the years. However, healthcare professionals have been influenced by uncountable legislation from governors and payers. These have not only slowed down digital health inclusion to their day to day practice but become a hurdle instead of an advantage.

Unfortunately, healthcare professional’s negative sentiment against the use of digital health has been passed to patients. This adds up to patients’ own misconceptions and mistrust on digital health mainly due to lack of knowledge, negative press releases, social media, personal experiences.

A Different Approach

The evident question is “how can we adopt digital health more broadly and learn to embrace it, turning COVID-19 threat into an opportunity to evolve?”. First step is to accept that the problem has not been digital health interoperability capabilities, nor the high investment required to make digital health part of our daily life. The problem is amongst us; a social and cultural issue.

Majority of the society could not envisage the collective benefits we could get from digital health as they have rarely seen any tangible improvements and have very little knowledge of what it actually means. If they could truly understand digital health as a win-win situation for us all as a society without mistrusting someone would take advantage‚ A things could move forward. It is a duty for new technologies providers and developers to educate society to raise their interest and eagerness to embrace digital health. Education is the key to development and success.

There is no need to force, lobby or negotiate to push new technologies into society. People need to see and understand benefits to the community through their own eyes to embrace it. The current situation is the biggest opportunity for all stakeholders to have a “taste” of the available digital options to improve, monitor and manage our health and resources dedicated to it. For instance, access to GPs on the same day via video calls has already made an impact saving lives through early referrals in the UK.

A Step into Digital Health

As it is known, the world’s eyes are on developing a vaccine against COVID-19, which is already seen as a key for future society trust. But who needs to gain that trust? Pharmaceutical companies, indeed. Hence, are they in the right place and at the right time to take the opportunity and embed digital health into society? I believe they are.

One way to make the most of society’s openness to trust is through making partnerships between pharmaceutical and technology developers which could combine best practices managing health and technological difficulties. This solely with the purpose of showing real application and benefit from digital health introduced by broadly formalised educational programmes to become the official source for digital health knowledge for all different stakeholders.

These formalised programmes could facilitate education broadly and empower society to evolve in a sustainable way. Small steps must be taken to create trust amongst society and to empower it to collectively identify benefits short and long term.

The Real Benefit

No economic benefit should be taken from these programmes. The real benefit will come from translated data, derived from digital health initiatives, into tangible improvements on three key areas:

• Population health, by identifying trends for early interventions.
• Patient care, by making informed decisions and developing a holistic approach to treatment.
• Health resources management by driving efficiencies and improving operational decisions.

Final Thoughts

The ultimate sense of wellbeing originated by an effective and efficient health management would drive eagerness to discover and innovate further. Digital health is on our doorstep for all of us, we must practice it and it will prevail.

You can read “Digital health adoption stalled prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but recent momentum signals change” by Jeff Lagasse on Healthcare Finance.