DIGITAL HEALTH: How Modern Technology Is Changing Medicine and Healthcare (original) (raw)
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Scientific Research Journal (SCIRJ),, 2019
The changes that are taking place in the healthcare sector are essential to social and intellectual evolution. Modern medicine is heavily dependent on the written and printed word to store data. However, computers have revolutionized the way information is kept and retrieved in the sense that computers not only cache information, but they also record clinical data and generate medical knowledge. Hence, digital health is the future and is more precise, efficient, experimental, and widely distributed. These features contribute towards technological development that ensures the creation of a new paradigm of medicine. While the adoption of digital health has promised various advantages in the cost savings, elimination of address and the improvement of patients' outcomes, there are still a few challenges that need attention before these advantages can be thoroughly practical. This paper explores the political, social, ethnic, and racial factors that could limit the adaptation of digital health.
Health in the Digital World, 2021
Information Technology (HIT) and Digital Health are rapidly transforming healthcare systems spurred by technology innovation, government initiatives, and growing challenges of the 21 st century in improving quality, efficiency, and patient experiences. Furthermore, the transformation of the healthcare system through new technological developments is moving into processes, practices and relationships across the ecosystem and is creating new opportunities for the sector and presents the potential to develop new strategies to cope with health risks.
Digital Health
What is digital health? This is a sample of the first chapter of the book 'Digital Health: How modern technology is changing medicine and healthcare'. This can be purchased from Amazon. ISBN: 9781446755969.
Frequent statements are now made in the medical and public health literature about an imminent revolution in health care, preventive medicine and public health driven by the use of digital devices and associated apps, websites and platforms. However it is important to adopt a more critical approach when assessing the impact and implications of digital health. Digital health technologies potentially generate different ways of thinking about, practising and experiencing medicine, healthcare and public health. From a perspective that is informed by critical social and cultural theory, these changes have the potential to challenge entrenched conceptualisations and experiences of illness, health, disease and medical care and practice. In this chapter, following an overview of the range of digital health technologies that are currently in use, I focus on the digital data that are generated from these technologies, discussing the implications for the digital knowledge economy, data security and privacy, social inequalities and civil rights.
What is Digital Health? Review of Definitions
Studies in Health Technology and Informatics
Digital technologies are transforming the health sector all over the world, however various aspects of this emerging field of science is yet to be properly understood. Ambiguity in the definition of digital health is a hurdle for research, policy, and practice in this field. With the aim of achieving a consensus in the definition of digital health, we undertook a quantitative analysis and term mapping of the published definitions of digital health. After inspecting 1527 records, we analyzed 95 unique definitions of digital health, from both scholar and general sources. The findings showed that digital health, as has been used in the literature, is more concerned about the provision of healthcare rather than the use of technology. Wellbeing of people, both at population and individual levels, have been more emphasized than the care of patients suffering from diseases. Also, the use of data and information for the care of patients was highlighted. A dominant concept in digital health ...
Digital health: A sociomaterial approach
Sociology of Health & Illness
The notion of digital health often remains an empty signifier, employed strategically for a vast array of demands to attract investments and legitimise reforms. Rather scarce are attempts to develop digital health towards an analytic notion that provides avenues for understanding the ongoing transformations in health care. This article develops a sociomaterial approach to understanding digital health, showing how digitalisation affords practices of health and medicine to cope with and utilise the combined and interrelated challenges of increases in quantification (data-intensive medicine), varieties of connectivity (telemedicine), and unprecedented modes of instantaneous calculation (algorithmic medicine). This enables an engagement with questions about what forms of knowledge, relationships and control are produced through different manifestations of digital health. The paper then sets out, in detail, three innovative strategies that can guide explorations and negotiations into the type of care we want to achieve through digital transformation. These strategies embed Karen Barad's concept of agential cuts suggesting that responsible cuts towards the materialisation of digital health require participatory efforts that recognise the affordances and the generativity of technology developments. Through the sociomaterial approach presented in this article, we aim to lay the foundations to reorient
Digital technologies and chronic disease management
Australian family physician, 2014
Digital technologies will become a major part of our healthcare system, with particular impact in primary care. However, many healthcare professionals are not sufficiently informed of the digital technologies available today and how they and their patients can gain substantial benefit from adoption of these technologies. To raise awareness of the potential benefits of using digital technologies for improving practice efficiencies and patient health outcomes. Implementing best practice care for patients with chronic and complex conditions is one of the greatest challenges facing gen-eral practice and other primary care providers. It has been suggested that digital technologies could assist by decreasing the administrative burden of care delivery, improving quality of care, increasing practice efficiencies and better supporting patient self-management. In this paper, we consider some areas in the management of chronic and long-term conditions where digital and mobile health solutions ...
Focus on the patient is the central pillar of the digital transformation in health!
Revista Brasileira de Geriatria e Gerontologia, 2019
Focus on the patient is the central pillar of the digital transformation in health! In 1903, the famous inventor Thomas Edison declared, in one of his many predictions about the future, that "the doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease". He saw a long way! This challenge to health is no surprise to some of us, yet still leaves us perplexed-we must persistently pursue the strategy of disease prevention rather than simply reacting to the treatment of those illnesses which occur and can be avoided. The perfect storm of factors that together make our current health services inaccessible and unsustainable is well known and well understood, given the number of studies published on the subject. Economic, epidemiological and demographic changes mean that the 'more of the same' formula is no longer able to deal with the many serious problems faced by health services in the 21st century 1. Rising health care costs, consumer expectations, new technologies and increasing globalization have placed huge pressure on the health sector, forcing it to align more closely with the economic constraints that every country suffers. Established long-term primary, secondary and tertiary care systems are increasingly unable to respond to the challenges arising from aging populations, as well as the shift in the burden of diseases to chronic conditions, such as diabetes and musculoskeletal and cardiovascular diseases.