Telemedicine is reshaping the form of medical services, and digital health tools are also reshaping the form of medical services. How to quantify its effects and how to protect patient privacy has become the key to industry development.
Digital health sector responsibilities and challenges
Walgreens has a digital health department whose core task is to integrate telemedicine services, wearable devices, and remote monitoring technology. This team was recognized by Forbes magazine in 2014 and named a leader in the field of digital health. Their focus is to connect disparate digital tools to provide patients with a coherent care experience, which requires technology development to be closely aligned with the actual medical process.
The challenge for this department is to ensure that these high-tech tools are not only innovative but also used frequently by patients and medical staff. They have to continuously test and optimize products to ensure stable and reliable services. At the same time, they also need to coordinate with hospitals, insurance companies, and many other organizations to break down the barriers between data and services.
Entrepreneurship Competitions and Quantitative Standards
In an entrepreneurial competition related to mobile medical care, eleven companies participated in the competition at the beginning. After layers of screening, four of them entered the second round of roadshows. The core criteria for selection are very clear: projects must be able to bring quantifiable and substantial improvements to medical services. This shows that contestants must not just stop at the concept level, but must come up with specific relevant data and implementation plans.
The company that finally won the award came up with a solution called "loop", which exquisitely integrates text messages, phone calls and even video calls into one system. The purpose of this planning is to ensure that patients will not be disconnected between different stages of care, thereby improving the integrity and continuity of treatment.
Innovative charging and service model
The company won the award, and it also has a major breakthrough in its charging model. It abandons the traditional charging method based on the number of services, and instead tries to price based on actual usage results. This model fits well with the "quantifiable" concept emphasized by the competition, and directly links the company's revenue to the improvement of patients' health.
This model of payment based on results has brought more stringent requirements to technology. Companies need to develop an accurate evaluation system to measure the effectiveness of their services on patients. This trend prompts them to collect health data at a deeper level and analyze these data to achieve objective evaluation of treatment results.
The evolution of physician tool platforms
Executives at a well-known medical information platform called WebMD said that what doctors currently need is more than just a community or database. As direct communication between doctors relies upon social media and becomes more common, the effect of traditional databases is diminished. Therefore, they launched a new product, which is positioned between professional databases and social tools.
The goal of this digital consulting platform is to become a more efficient assistant for doctors at work. While trying to provide authoritative medical information, it also promotes safe communication among peers and avoids the privacy risks that may arise when using mass social software, thereby meeting doctors' needs for professionalism and security.
Data privacy and industry regulations
In the medical field in the United States, protecting patient privacy is the first principle when using any doctor's tool. This is the fundamental reason why the industry has always been vigilant about using ordinary social platforms for professional communication. During the design of any digital health product, data security architecture must be placed at the core level.
This focus on privacy has profoundly impacted product form. For example, there was a team that used big data to predict global epidemic trends and published the research results in top journals. Although such work relies on a large amount of data, the entire process strictly follows ethical and legal norms to ensure that personal information is not leaked for no reason.
The future direction of wearable devices
Industry experts emphasized that wearable devices with medical prospects must be consumer-oriented. It must not only have functional accuracy that meets medical requirements, but also must not lose the comfort and convenience of being a daily wear item. Many current devices cannot easily meet these two points at the same time, thus limiting their large-scale cooperation with medical institutions.
The market for wearable devices is currently in the process of rapid expansion. The user group originally started from the category of early sports enthusiasts, but has now expanded to cover all ordinary consumers who care about health. This situation clearly shows that the relevant equipment in the future must be more effectively integrated into people's daily lives to the greatest extent possible, and must also be able to generate data that can actually play a useful role in clinical diagnosis and treatment, based on which it will eventually grow into a reliable link in the ecosystem built for personal health.
For ordinary patients, is the key to more convenient remote consultation services or more stringent data privacy protection? Which type of digital health tool do you prefer? Welcome to share your views in the comment area. If you find this article inspiring, please like it to support it.
