Guide to building Digital Health solutions

An ageing population and the rise in chronic conditions is putting a huge strain on healthcare resources worldwide. Long-term illnesses consume over 70% of the healthcare budget spend (approximately £67 billion) in the U.K. [1]. In the U.S, over 75% of its healthcare spend is on chronic disease care [2] and its healthcare expenditure is projected to grow at an average rate of 5.5% per year for 2017–26 and to reach $5.7 trillion by 2026 [3]; a growth rate which is unsustainable in the long term.

Pathways to improving healthcare

Patients suffering from chronic conditions are beginning to look for alternative tools to help them manage their condition. Evidence suggests that by empowering chronically ill patients with the necessary tools to self-manage their condition, it reduces: hospitalisations, emergency department use, and overall managed care costs [4].

Likewise, healthcare professionals are eager to find innovative ways to gain a better understanding of how to manage and treat patients with chronic conditions.

Other industries have been revolutionized through advancements in technology. Now, the healthcare industry is on the cusp of a digital revolution, often referred to as ‘digital health’.

What is Digital Health?

Digital Health is the provision of healthcare through the use of technology so that it can supply cutting-edge services to improve health outcomes such as:

• Remote medical consultations via video conferencing (TeleHealth)
• Electronic health records
• Patient monitoring systems and wearable device integrations that can monitor patient’s vital signs such as heart rate, blood pressure
• Use of mobile technologies such as smartphones for healthcare delivery

Our team at ResearchHug have worked with world-renowned healthcare institutions to enable healthcare professionals to gain a better understanding of chronic health conditions and enable patients to self-manage their chronic conditions through digital health.

ResearchHug team have first hand experience in realising the wonderful impact that digital health has on patients lives. However, building effective and secure digital health solutions is challenging; which is the reason why ResearchHug team have built a platform that accelerates the pathway of healthcare professionals to digital health [5].

ResearchHug would like to share our experience in building digital health solutions, so we’ll be writing a series of articles to enable you to take the first step into digital health; from a ‘Eureka’ moment to getting the solution into the real-world.

The topics that we will cover are:

1. Idea — Everything starts off with an idea. ResearchHug have some excellent strategies that you can use to test and validate ideas
2. Market Research — Now that the idea is validated, its time to research the market
3. Marketing Strategy — Quite often, marketing is treated as an after-thought in digital health.
4. Sell your idea — Convince key stakeholders why they should invest resources in the idea
5. Build your team — Creating an effective digital health solution can be tricky as it requires an interdisciplinary team
6. Build your first digital health pilot
7. Launch digital health pilot
8. Evaluate your digital health pilot
9. Determine next steps in your digital health journey

See you next week with the first article of the series: Idea

References

1. NHS Five Year Plan — https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/5yfv-web.pdf
2. National Health Council –http://www.nationalhealthcouncil.org/sites/default/files/AboutChronicDisease.pdf
3. CMS — National Health Expenditure Projections 2017–2026 https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/Downloads/ForecastSummary.pdf
4. Supporting self-management in patients with chronic illness. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16273817
5. ResearchHug — A platform to build your digital health solution in just a few clicks. https://www.researchhug.com

View all posts by David Coleman

Published August 24, 2018August 30, 2018

Originally published at blog.researchhug.com on August 24, 2018.