PLX Academy · News · 01 April 2022
digital health
A global leader in medical technology and a top ranking academic medical centre – Mayo Clinic, tackles the topic of the cost of health tech.
Digital health, or digital healthcare, is a broad, multidisciplinary concept that includes concepts from an intersection between technology and healthcare. Digital transformation is expensive and rarely smooth, often leading to higher costs than anticipated. Although at its infancy in healthcare, advocates claim that the digital future will bring more precise interventions, higher health outcomes, more efficiency, and eventually lower healthcare costs.
A global leader in medical technology and a top ranking academic medical centre – Mayo Clinic, tackles the topic of the cost of health tech. The main question is how realistic is the promise of lower expenditures and enhanced health.
Dr Steve Ommen who is the Medical Director of Consumer Product and Platform Strategy at Mayo Clinic Center for Digital Health says that digital healthcare solutions are improving efficiency in many health care systems.
“From a patient’s perspective, the ability to get care without having to travel to a facility is much more efficient for their daily life. Provider teams are also finding that many of the video visits actually take less time than in-person visits and asynchronous activities such as secure messaging or online algorithmic care options improve efficiencies for those teams.
Remote patient monitoring, the use of devices that the patient wears or has in their home to monitor physiologic parameters such as heart rate and blood pressure, allows a small team of nurses to monitor a large number of patients and look for deviations from the expected physiologic data that might indicate a patient is getting sicker. This allows an earlier and less costly intervention in many cases”.
He notes that while tools like video visits have become commonplace and are quite familiar to most physicians, the newer solutions such as artificial intelligence or in-home remote monitoring require teams to get more familiar and adopt some of their care pathways to fully take advantage of these solutions.