
Technology helps the doctor’s work, but there are risks.
What is Digital Health?
edited by Vincenzo Marra, Co-Founder DigitalUHealth
The expression may sound rather modern, little known and in fact the exploit of its spread has occurred in recent years, mainly thanks to Paul Sonnier, but actually it is not such a new concept. Already in 2000 Seth Frank wrote an article entitled “Digital Health Care — The convergence of health care and the Internet” in the Journal of Ambulatory Care Management.
Today, technology is rapidly transforming health care. The creative destruction of medicine by Eric Topol highlights how these digital technologies, social networking, mobile connectivity and broadband, growing computing power and the data universe will converge with wireless sensors, genomics, imaging and health information systems to implement a creative destruction of medicine as we know it.
We also speak of digital medicine but obviously it is not a concept superimposable with digital health, as the term health has always had a broader meaning than medicine, and the same is true for digital health, which arises at the intersection between health and technology, and not just in medicine, but in all health care, including well-being and administration. From this last point it is therefore clear that the same applies to digital health care, which is a not so frequent expression, while it is so widely used in Italy to be regulated and appear on the website of Agency for Digital Italy, Presidency of the Council of Ministers.
It immediately becomes clear how digital health regards a scientific area (and not only) in constant evolution, so providing a univocal and granitic definition proves to be a rather difficult task.
The best thing to do is to see how effectively the world’s leading digital health experts define this sector, a study that we will do in detail in the future.
Who needs digital in medicine? What if done wrong? I hold on to pen and paper, thanks anyway.
edited by Dr. Sergio Pillon, Coordinator of the Joint Technical Commission of the State-Regions Conference for the development of national telemedicine
One of the “mottos” launched by Google is “work the way you live”. The corollary is BYOD, “bring your own device”.
We know well how many of us (almost all of us) use the smartphone, and not just the phone, to work, we also use a desktop PC, and not just as a typewriter. This is not always convenient, it is not always “legal”, privacy is not always protected, for example through the use of various messaging systems, but it is something that we can hardly oppose. We physicians can no longer do without using the Internet in our daily activity. Raise your hands who still use the handbook to look for a drug that don’t know or who have never searched on Google, while the patient explained a syndrome with an unknown name. Of course, today we have the “information at our fingertip”, as Bill Gates promised in the golden age… so why can we buy on Amazon with a click, make a bank transfer in a few seconds and can we not ensure that a therapeutic plan inserted on the AIFA website can automatically be added to the Region’s website? Why an electronic recipe must be printed and moreover with a laser printer (many of the inkjet ones don’t have a sufficient definition) that must support A5 sheets but also be set by a technician in order to print on the regional recipe, that in many regions has its own dimensions? And if the laser printers are networked, how do we insert the regional recipe book?
A very interesting article on JAMA talks about how critical the well-being of the doctor is for an effective, efficient and appropriate healthcare system and it proposes a “Charter on Physician Well-being”. The summary says: “Physicians who are well can best serve their patients. Meaningful work, strong relationships with patients, positive team structures, and social connection at work are important factors for physician well-being. Although evidence to support some of the recommendations in this charter is still emerging, medical organizations, regulatory groups and individual physicians share a responsibility to support these needs. The Charter on Physician Well-being is intended to inspire collaborative efforts among individuals, organizations, health systems, and the profession of medicine to honor the collective commitment of physicians to patients and to each other. “
Do we agree? One of the biggest obstacles to the physician well-being is the constantly growing healthcare bureaucracy. So what are the third millennium tools to carry out these needs? To reduce the bureaucratic burden, simplify the relationship with the patient, simplify the diagnosis and treatment process, team-build, improve social connections, in short: doing our work well and with satisfaction. One, the usual one, which we were talking about at the beginning: a well-guided digital, the one that makes life easier for the physician, for the patient, for the healthcare companies.
The force (of digital) flows powerful in the health system but has a dark side: we risk losing sight of the patient, the physician and the purpose of our profession. And unfortunately until today the dark side has won many times, in incomprehensible health software, in reservation portals inaccessible by smartphones, in expensive and ancient software, in stupid bureaucracy. Dear bureaucrats, does it seem logical to use a training course to use an intramoenia patient booking system? Or that to prescribe a NOAC (New Oral Anticoagulant), that is to do a therapeutic plan, insert it into the regional system, make two recipes and certificate of illness, it takes twice the time it takes to visit and do a Doppler echocardiography? If you needed a course to buy on Amazon, Bezos would be bankrupt. Also for this we wrote the national guidelines for Telemedicine, now we can only hope that in the Regions they are read instead that the first chapter is just mentioned in the deliberations!
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