My wife, a doctor, shifted to seeing many patients using technology-enabled telehealth. The silver lining of the pandemic is it taught us there are better ways of doing lots of things—from getting takeout food and drinks to quashing laws restricting doctors’ providing health care remotely and even across state lines.
Technology has helped us during the pandemic and allowed us to do things in new ways. Now we rely on tech to learn, work, and stay in touch. Amid the pandemic, companies in the retail, travel, and entertainment industries shifted to online experiences for their customers when COVID-19 halted shopping in physical stores, dining in restaurants, and traveling.
The pandemic accelerated the use of digital health services and tools—a critical step amid the surge of patients and a strained medical workforce. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports 95% of health centers used telehealth services amid COVID-19, double the number using them just 1 year ago. And the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) expanded the list of telehealth services and allowed telehealth to be provided anywhere a patient lived in the country, and allowed patients to receive these services from home—increasing telehealth adoption across the country.
When in-person health care visits were restricted to limit virus exposure, telehealth made it safer for patients to visit their doctors from the safety of their own homes—no sitting in waiting rooms with other patients, no exposure to public transmission of the virus.
Remote health solutions and devices such as wearables and connected health monitoring devices offer real-time communication between patients and clinicians—from blood pressure monitoring to face-to-face video solutions.
As more people take control of their health, it’s critical we fully understand the capabilities of health technologies and how to advance their adoption. Establishing best practices and standards is a starting point in understanding digital heath and to further improve outcomes, lower costs, and enhance patient experiences.
A standard is developed by bringing together critical stakeholders within an industry to build consensus, from developing a product to providing a service, controlling processes, and communicating with the world. This behind-the-scenes work helps make the use of products easier and the transition from one product or service to another effortless.
Standards have worked tremendously well in many sectors. The automotive industry has standards for everything from nuts and bolts to the on-board diagnostics data port that every car in the United States uses. We also see success in the television broadcast world—standards allow you to turn on your TV, connect an antenna, and start watching.
As tech becomes part of mainstream health care, the need for standardization is paramount to build trust in the solutions. The Consumer Technology Association (CTA)—accredited to develop ANSI standards—leads many convening efforts, bringing together tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Samsung and health care leaders including CVS Health and Doctor On Demand to foster standardization for innovation.
A relatively new branch of digital health, digital therapeutics uses software-based interventions to enhance or provide care. The use of digital therapeutics can provide greater insight into the personal health of a patient, giving them greater ownership and personalization on a day-to-day basis, as opposed to when they go to the doctor’s office a few times a year.
Today, we are seeing use of a wide variety of tech solutions in this area. Ginger, a mental health company, offers on-demand mental health support with trained behavioral health coaches, therapists, and psychiatrists through its mobile app; whereas Healium leverages virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) travel to allow users to biometrically alter their virtual environment through emotions, decreasing their stress.
As its use and adoption grow, so does the need to document a common understanding of the technology. We are making progress in how we understand the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care. After setting standards for the use of and trustworthiness in AI in health care, CTA’s working group is now focused on the next challenge: data stewardship.
For health professionals, standardization can improve patient outcomes—leveraging digital heath solutions to treat chronic care and better protect health care workers. With standards, patients can expect a consistent level of performance when using digital health tools such as wearables to help monitor and manage their health. And applying common standards to products, apps, and software can free up competition for innovators, giving consumers more choices.
CTA research shows more consumers plan to continue using telehealth post-COVID-19, and more doctors are changing their attitudes toward the benefits of digital health technologies. Indeed, the Philips Future Health Index, a global survey of 500 doctors, reported that over half of doctors rated AI as the top digital health technology that would most improve their work satisfaction, and 39% identified telehealth as a top technology. As doctors work through the pandemic, more than half ranked telehealth as the digital health technology that would have most improved their experiences in the pandemic, and half ranked AI as a top technology.
From wearables to robotic-assisted surgery—and mobile apps to managing telemedicine and e-prescriptions—standardization and best practices will help ensure new technologies deliver better health outcomes and lower costs for patients around the world.
PS: As for my wife, patients love the more personal, mask-less telehealth experience. And for me, I was thrilled to be the patient benefiting from the telehealth experience.
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