Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
An interesting report from the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies examined the “Use of digital health tools in Europe: before, during and after COVID-19“. Digital health is important not only because the technologies facilitate communication and disease monitoring, but also the technologies facilitate the creation of data that can be used to better…
That is the title of a recent commentary published in the Journal of Clinical Pathways with my colleague David Gruber. New digital technologies have the potential to greatly improve our healthcare system on multiple fronts. Telemedicine allowed many patients to communicate with their doctors during the COVID-19 pandemic; during the height of the pandemic, 30% of…
This is the title of a paper published today with co-authors Suepattra May, Caroline Huber, Meaghan Roach, Wade Aubry, Darius Lakdawalla, John Kane, and Felicia Forma. The subtitle is “Qualitative Case Study of Glucose Monitoring Technology“. The abstract is below. Background: Evaluation of patients with serious mental illness (SMI) relies largely on patient or caregiver…
With the rise of telemedicine due to the COVID-19 pandemic and–before that–the increasing ubiquity of smartphones, digital medicine appears to be the wave of the future. At least that is the topic of a recent article on health care and technology in The Economist. Despite all this hope, we are far from a fully digital…
The answer is ‘maybe’. Some are scarred by the distance between the hype and reality of electronic health records (EHR), which promised both improved efficiency for practices and superior patient health outcomes. In practice–especially in the short-turn–EMR resulted in a lot of both direct and data entry cost to practices with limited interoperability and modest…
FDA faces an near existential crisis: digital. New digital technologies have the capability to improve the way care is delivered to patients. The question is, how do we make sure it is safe? The FDA is certainly good at making sure drugs and devices are safe; in the case of digital however, it is less…
Where is digital health taking off? One way to answer this question is to look to see where research is currently being conducted to determine where innovation is most likely in the future. The American Medical Association (AMA) summarizes the Chen et al. (2019) paper in JAMA that looks at the number of government-registered digital…
The FDA estimates that 50% of all 3.4 billion worldwide smartphone users have downloaded a health app. Do these apps work? Even if they work for the average patient, will they work for you? And with whom could you discuss your app-based treatment options? To answer these questions, in the future you may need a…
This week, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) released a document titled Evidence standards framework for digital health technologies. An accompanying piece in The Lancet by Greaves et al. (2018) aims to describe the goals of the document at a high level. The authors state that key…