[LINK] Digital Health

[David]

On Wednesday 18 January 2017 16:10:55 Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
> Here's his definition of Digital Health
> 
> "Digital Health is a disruptive and transformational approach to the delivery of healthcare, with a focus on engaging and empowering patients, activating caregiver networks and understanding that patients are increasingly behaving as consumers of healthcare. Digital Health provides us with a toolbox of technologies and techniques that support the development of new, innovative patient and caregiver-centred models of care, driving improved engagement, accessibility, quality, safety, efficiency and sustainability into all corners of the health system."

The article seems to me a fine example of its kind: so much consultant-speak, so little meaning.

What on earth is meant by "patients are increasingly behaving as consumers of healthcare"?  The article doesn't explain that, but it seems to involve patients' mobile phones:  "Digital Health gives us an opportunity that we’ve never had before – the chance to reach into the lives of almost every health consumer in the world, regardless of socio-economic status. Through mobile devices we have the opportunity to create a  digital channel to the health consumer."

In other words, the health bureaucracy will be able to monitor every citizen via their smart phone.  (Indeed "every health consumer in the world" - it's not short on ambition :-)  Of course some malcontents will prefer privacy and a life free of the wretched smart phone, some will be too old & infirm, and perhaps many will simply fail to see why they need to complicate their lives to support yet another e-bureaucracy.

Stand-out omissions in the article are the lack of even a one-paragraph estimate of cost-benefit, and a convincing example of the end-to-end process from patient to doctor.

It's all arm-waving, long-lunch stuff.

Sigh...

David L.