Question

The heart of patient-provider communication is the concept of participatory medicine or shared decision making. Discuss the concept of patient empowerment through digital technologies and provide 2 examples of solutions/apps/software used for patient empowerment and engagement.

Support your writings by at least 2 references (APA style)

Answer 1

PATIENT EMPOWERMENT THROUGH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES

Empowering patients with digital technology.Digital technologies  connected health or technology-enabled care (TEC) was defined as the collective term used for telecare, telehealth, telemedicine, mHealth, digital health, and eHealth services.This type of technology can empower patients and carers by giving them more control over their health and social care needs. It can also help individuals to obtain more information regarding their health.The use of digital technology to educate patients and carers is a crucial driver of patient engagement. Surveys suggest that patients are more likely to make better choices and be engaged in their health if they can access information quickly.

Improved adherence allows healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies to obtain a better understanding of the impact of drugs, including any complications or drug interactions, providing useful data for research. An increasing number of pharmaceutical companies are investing in digital TEC projects to increase patient adherence to the drugs they produce. Likewise, patients and carers are increasingly using digital health software to register and monitor medication intake .

Digital technology connects patients and providers, leading to better health outcomes and a more convenient and personalised service, through informing/educating, two-way remote monitoring, and supporting treatment adherence .TEC can help carers understand and support those they care for by:

Providing psychological reassurance

Enabling carers to co-ordinate their work-life-care balance through supporting flexible hours and remote working patterns (approximately 2.3 million people have had to give up work to become carers and three million have reduced their hours)

Delivering peer-to-peer support

Facilitates remote patient monitoring (RPM)

Remote monitoring uses technology to monitor changes in patients’ health status outside conventional clinical settings.

Patient Empowerment Foundation’s mission is to help patients and their families gain the knowledge and confidence to play an active role in their care.

Historically, it allows a patient to use a device to perform a routine test and send the test data to a healthcare provider. Initially, it depended on a healthcare provider recommending its use to patients. However, digital technology has increased the potential for remote monitoring and, with the advent of apps and wearables, patients are increasingly bringing the innovation to doctors .New advances in the development of biosensing wearables are spreading their capability beyond simply tracking activity. New devices can monitor a broad range of physiology (from posture to brain activity) and convert this information into outputs, through advanced connectivity and computing power.Biosensing wearables can support people with chronic conditions, automating monitoring and detecting real time changes in an individual’s health status. Data from biosensing wearables can be uploaded to an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) and this information can be used to display an overview of a patient’s medical history in real-time, supporting early diagnoses and early intervention.

Example of PATIENT EMPOWERMENT THROUGH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES

Nowadays, patients and their carers use technology to research information online, identify treatment options, rate providers, and share their experiences. Healthcare needs to acknowledge that emerging technologies offer a tremendous opportunity to transform the way people engage with their health.Besides connecting patients and providers, digital technology leads to better outcomes and a more personalised service by educating patients in regards to their health-related issues, enabling remote monitoring, and supporting treatment adherence.

It is estimated that 75% of the UK population goes online for health information. Websites, apps, videos, texts and free online courses are being used to educate and provide information to patients and their family caregivers .

Take the new Apple Watch functionality of heart rate notifications for example. Research like the Apple Heart Study suggests this exciting innovation could lead to significantly improved detection rates of heart rhythm disorders, and enhanced stroke prevention efforts.But when a patient receives a high heart rate notification, what should they do? Ignore it? Go to a GP? Head straight to the emergency department? And, what is the flow on impact on the health system?

Many of these questions remain unanswered suggesting there is an urgent need for research that examines how technology is implemented into existing healthcare systems.

If we are to produce useful digital therapeutics for real-world problems, then it is critical that the end-users are engaged in the process. Patients and healthcare professionals will need to work with software developers to design applications that meet the complex healthcare needs of patients.

Mobile health initiative

Mobile health initiatives aim to give patients more medical information and to empower them over their medical treatments. However, information overload and lack of digital literacy may hinder patient empowerment. This chapter investigates opportunities and challenges of patient empowerment and mobile health. The authors analyze the different definitions used in the literature to characterize patient empowerment and mobile health, discussing implications for all the care actors involved. Although the adoption rate of mobile technologies is at its infant stage and challenges still outweigh the benefits of patient empowerment, mobile health apps can foster the progress towards patient-centered care.

At the conference we saw some solutions working in this direction, for example, IOMED , a software created by a group of entrepreneurs from Barcelona that structures and codifies notes from EHRs and transforms them into useful insights. The system is currently available in Spanish and Catalan and is being used in Barcelona Vall d’Hebron Hospital.

onthAnother app that is building key insights from data given by the users is LactApp, which works as a virtual breastfeeding consultant that gives personalised advice to mums in the first month of the baby.

Last month we attended in Barcelona the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the biggest mobile technology conference in the world. In the last years health has become an important part of the event as more technological companies are entering the healthcare sector. Within MWC, the Digital Health Summit organised by ECHAlliance gathered numerous entrepreneurs in the field of digital health and showcased interesting solutions for patients and organisations.

another example ,

digital therapeutics

Digital therapeutics can be defined as any intervention that is digitally delivered and has a therapeutic effect on a patient. They can be used to treat medical conditions in a similar way to drugs or surgery.

Current examples of digital therapeutics include apps for managing medications and cardiovascular health, apps to support mental health and well being, or augmented and virtual reality tools for patient education.

Paper-based letters, health records, prescription charts and education pamphlets are outdated. We can now send emails, enter information into electronic databases and access electronic medication charts.

And patient education is no longer a static, one-way communication. The digital revolution facilitates dynamic and personalised education, and a two-way interaction between patient and therapist.

How do digital therapeutics help?

Digital health care improves overall quality of care, even in cases where a patient lives hundreds of kilometres away from their doctor.Take diabetes for example. This condition affects 1.7 million Australians. It’s a major risk factor for developing cardiovascular disease and stroke. So it’s important that people with diabetes manage their condition to reduce their risk.

A recent study evaluated a team-based online game, which was delivered by an app to provide diabetes self-management education. The participants who received the app in this trial had meaningful More emphasis is given on stress management and well-being at the workplace through safe and suitable use of technology. Personal relationships with doctors might be lost as a result of the Internet and e-health services, which is an ethical dilemma. Methods: A survey was used as the main research method in addition to description. The sample was composed of 30 students from three healthcare study streams, attending the course entitled Management in healthcare. Results: The research indicates that smart technologies have strengthened the influence of patients and assigned them a more balanced place in the healthcare system. sustained improvements in their diabetes, as measured by their HbA1c (blood glucose levels).App based games of this kind hold promise to improve chronic disease outcomes at scale.Technology also enables patients to have more self-regulation and self-control. Discussion: The evolution of healthcare education in line with the use of the Internet in healthcare settings is discussed.

New electronic devices are also being used by people of all ages to track activity, measure sleep and record nutrition. This information provides instant and accurate feedback to individuals and their therapists, allowing for adjustments where necessary. The logged information can also be combined into large data sets to reveal patterns over time and inform future treatments.

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