BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Hold The Phone: Digital Health Is Way More Than Remote Doctors’ Visits

Forbes Technology Council

Mike McSherry, CEO and Co-Founder of Xealth.

In-person doctor visits can be a hassle. But health care systems only decided that virtual visits could be a viable option when in-person visits switched from being annoying to being risky.

Why? For all the talk around "patient-centric care," why do health care systems think people want to go back to the old way of battling traffic, paying for parking, sitting in a waiting room scrolling on their phone for a 10-minute follow-up appointment? 

As someone who spent significant time in consumer technology, I sometimes struggle to come to terms with the idea that things I view as normal — like people using their smartphones for nearly everything — are still relatively new concepts in health care. Just last year, a senior health industry executive remarked to me about being too "wedded to our telephonic method" to follow up with patients. 

Is this really how health care leaders want to connect with patients — by calling and asking them to come into the office? Given comments like these, many people are willing to chalk up the recent uptick in telehealth adoption as a win and call that digital health.  

This narrow focus on telehealth hinders creativity and imagination: There are many other components of digital health, which present a multitude of opportunities to capture the attention and loyalty of patients.

How many things can we call 'digital health'?

In addition to virtual visits that remotely give medical and mental health care, digital health includes everything from wearable devices and mobile medical apps that monitor cardiac activity and help manage chronic disease to AI and software that supports clinical decision-making to transportation and meal delivery to remote patient monitoring. The latter, especially, has not been getting the attention it deserves.

It may have taken a pandemic to get widespread usage of telehealth, but progress cannot stop there. The best way to serve patients is to continue supporting innovation in digital health, which strengthens connections between providers and patients.

Digital health innovation is exploding with payers and employers, while many medical providers are barely getting out of the starting gate with it. That puts those health providers at a competitive disadvantage and can limit their ability to care for patients.

This pandemic has underscored the importance of digital health. It has shown us in stark ways that maintaining the status quo is not an option. The health care organizations who successfully adopt digital health as part of a broader care model have the best chance at survival. 

Where to start? Remote patient monitoring keeps patients out of hospitals.

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) involves using digital technologies to collect health data from patients in one place and securely transmit it electronically to care providers in a different location for assessment. 

For example, my company worked with Providence health system — consisting of 501 hospitals, 1,070 clinics and 120,000 caregivers and a comprehensive range of health and social services across seven western states — to help monitor thousands of patients suffering from Covid-19 symptoms using an RPM platform of pulse oximeters and thermometers from the patients home. If their condition worsens, a care team is alerted to intervene.

I like this example because it closes the information loop. A proper RPM solution will automatically reach out to at-risk patients via secure text messaging, phone, apps or devices to gather live information about symptoms, and send alerts to their care team if immediate attention is required. The underlying platform provides automation and integration into the provider’s electronic health record workflow.

Digital health and health equity: Expanding access to care is the right thing to do.

The pandemic highlights the escalating need to find ways to serve people without access to proper care. It has laid bare the glaring discrepancies in health care between urban and rural areas and between those with money and without. Digital health provides a way to start leveling these disparities.

Health care inequality is never okay, and the life and death impact of such disparities is even more obvious in a pandemic. One challenge to digital health adoption has been around reimbursement. Commercial plans have started covering tools that help manage chronic conditions, but Medicare and Medicaid have fallen behind. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services should reimburse providers for proven digital health therapeutics — and continue reimbursement after Covid-19 has been controlled through widespread vaccination.

Separately, implementing digital health has mostly been a piecemeal operation with different departments running disjointed pilots. Having a vendor-neutral framework in place to roll out cohesive, interconnected digital health programs is key. This framework will help organizations scale their digital health programs and better engage patients.

When selecting a partner, finding one that is willing to enable and scale your vision, offering best practices along the way, is critical. Vendor partners too often try to reshape a customer's goal to fit their offering. Industries as nuanced as health care require collaboration and both sides to work together.  

As we build on the momentum started in 2020, let's not lose our nerve and go back to making our patients come to us for everything. Let's go to them. We can think creatively, and with the patient at the center, by keeping digital health's full picture in view and find ways to make meaningful changes that deliver the absolute best care possible during the pandemic — and beyond.


Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?


Follow me on Twitter or LinkedInCheck out my website