The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has reported that nearly 900,000 Americans die prematurely from the five leading causes of death which include heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, and unintentional injuries. While politicians try to solve the problem of affordable healthcare, health care professions are continuously working on new technologies that will revolutionize our healthcare industry. These new technologies soon to be integrated into healthcare is known as digital healthcare. Soon this field will not only rapidly improve the diagnosis and treatment of chronic diseases but as well as to help patients in a plethora of ways including vastly improving their physical and mental health. This will eventually lead to a very affordable and accessible health care plan in which many people may not have access to otherwise.

The Benefits of Digital Healthcare:
The Quality of Healthcare

In order to improve the quality of healthcare, you must recognize the quantitative change from point A to point B. But what does quality even look like in the healthcare field? The Institute of Medicine defines health care quality as “the degree to which health care services for individuals and populations increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes and are consistent with current professional knowledge.” One statistic that can be used to hint to the overall quality of healthcare being improved is that, in more modern times, humans are now living much longer. On average the life expectancy increased from less than 40 years to over 72 years over a two-hundred-year time span. This dramatic increase in life expectancy can be attributed to rises of new technologies, and as we enter a new age of technological advancements, the quality of healthcare will further increase.

Figure 1: Life Expectancy (Accessible in PDF Version) 

Expanding Healthcare Professionals

In the first half of 2020, 43.4% of U.S. adults ages 19 to 64 were inadequately insured. This is partly due to the fact that healthcare is expensive in America and might be inaccessible for a majority of the population. New digital healthcare technologies try to resolve this by lowering the financial burden on healthcare professionals as well as expanding their reach. This is especially important for patients located in rural areas or for patients in which it is difficult for them to travel. With high-performing technologies in their pocket, patients are easily equipped to provide their health information to their physician at any time.

Prevention

One major upside is that new technologies help patients manage their health conditions more efficiently. Most importantly, it can be used as a tool for early detection for a life-threatening disease. Approximately 42,000 adults and 300 children in the United States die each year from vaccine-preventable diseases. That is why it is beneficial that many people are able to detect these diseases before they become irreversible. Although that is the case, digital healthcare has a long way to go before becoming self-sufficient in it.

The Future of Digital Healthcare

As we become more technologically advanced, the healthcare sector will prosper proportionally to it. The most popular fields of digital health technologies include wearable devices, 3D bioprinting, artificial intelligence, telemedicine, and augmented reality. In the future, tons of data will be collected and will provide more information for individuals. This will give rise to various wearable devices. Wearable devices will uphold the great promises by bringing personalized information and health-related tracking for all users. In healthcare, 3D bioprinting is used to create tissue or living human cells for use in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. This technology will be the key for patients who need additional organs or limbs. Given all of the data healthcare professionals will possess in the future, it’s inevitable that artificial intelligence will soon help healthcare professionals in ways they could never imagine. More focused on the present we have telemedicine which is how physicians treat patients remotely. Also, in terms of digitized treatment, augmented reality can create different situations for patients that can be repeated and tailored to treat many conditions. We are only now seeing a few of these technologies are being used by various startups, but as time goes on the digital healthcare field will soon be revolutionized.

Wearable Devices

Wearable devices come in a variety of forms, including smart glasses, smart helmets, and smart watches. In some cases, people can implant devices in their body. Many of these devices record different data points such as calories burnt, body mass index, and heart rate. Beyond the scope of these wearables, researchers are developing smart-related bodywear, such as clothing, patches, and other accessories, to deliver an on-demand drug release. This technology will have the ability to expand into smart implants in both severe and non-severe cases. These types of technologies are used to collect data on patients at all times. Since it is no longer necessary to have patients come into the office because their doctors will already have the necessary data, the data can lead to better treatment. Doctors will soon have a better insight into how well a certain medication is performing.

The Market research firm IDTechEx has projected the wearable device market will reach $100 billion by 2023. It is estimated that wearables among adults are projected to grow from 18.1% in 2017 to 25.3% by 2023. In 2019, 3.8 million American children and teens have owned a wearable device. 38% of wearable users are in the ages of 25 and 34, and 13.2% of users are between 55 and 64. Also, just over half of the adult American population (50.4%) are routinely wearing a smartwatch. By 2021, 16% of all wearable devices will be smartwatches, and 30% of smartwatch unit shipments will be smartphones designed specifically for children. By 2022, 28.9 million millennials will own a wearable device, and 25.5 million will use a wearable at least once a month.

3D Bio-printing

3D bio-printing is the creation of living tissue, such as bone, blood vessels, and hearts. It is known that some innovations are still in their infancy stages, but the core of 3D bio-printing promises some truly mind-boggling advancements. The global 3D bio-printing market size was valued at USD 1.2 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 17.4% from 2020 to 2027. The growth of this market is attributed to a limited number of organ donors, and an increasingly aging population with chronic respiratory diseases. 3D bio-printing is witnessing demand on a large scale with the increasing spread of Covid-19. Hence, many pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical participants are coming forward to help healthcare workers, physicians, and scientists in all possible ways.

Figure 2: Global 3D Bioprinting Market Size (Accessible in PDF Version) 

Stratasys which is one of the leading manufacturers of 3D printers in America has manufactured face shields with the help of a 3D bio-printer. Until March 2020, they have shipped 1,00,000 face shields in the U.S. There is also ongoing research on the development of 3D-printed hearts and other organs. According to the United Kingdom National Health Service (NHS), 429 patients have died in 2014 in the UK while being on the waiting list for an organ transplant, 38 of which were waiting for heart transplants. What a horrible reality it is that a patient who needs an organ transplant either has to wait for someone alive or dead to donate.

Artificial Intelligence

The global artificial intelligence in healthcare market size valued at USD 2.5 billion in 2018 and is expected to grow 41.5% from 2019 to 2025. The growing need for lowering healthcare costs, growing importance of big data in healthcare, rising adoption of precision medicine, and declining hardware costs are some factors driving growth. Artificial intelligence has the potential to completely change healthcare as we see it today. Complex AI algorithms are able to design treatment plans, create drugs, or mine medical records way faster than any medical professional can.

Figure 3: Global Artificial Intelligence (Accessible in PDF Version) 

The company, Atomwise, uses supercomputers to compute complex mathematical problems in order to run their AI algorithms more efficiently. In 2015, they launched a search for safe and existing medicines that could be redesigned to treat the Ebola virus. The company’s AI technology predicted two particular drugs by which they may have significantly reduced Ebola infectivity. Also, Google’s DeepMind has created an AI algorithm for breast cancer detection. The algorithm outperformed all human radiologists on pre-existing datasets to identify breast cancer among different women, on average by about 11.5%! These two examples are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to using AI to advance healthcare.

The healthcare ecosystem is realizing the importance of AI-powered tools in the next-generation healthcare technology. It is believed that AI can bring improvements to any process within healthcare operation and delivery. For instance, the cost savings that AI can bring to the healthcare system is an important driver for implementation of AI applications. It is estimated that AI applications can cut annual US healthcare costs by USD 150 billion in 2026. A large part of these cost reductions stem from changing the healthcare model from a reactive to a proactive approach, focusing on health management rather than disease treatment. This is expected to result in fewer hospitalizations, less doctor visits, and less treatments. AI-based technology will have an important role in helping people stay healthy via continuous monitoring and coaching and will ensure earlier diagnosis, tailored treatments, and more efficient follow-ups.

Telemedicine

Telemedicine is known to be one of the broadest topics of digital health. It encompasses the digitization of medical records, appointment bookings, remote care, self-symptom checkers, and many others. The use of telehealth has expanded exponentially since the late 1990s, and current projections indicate that its use will occupy a $30 billion dollars of the healthcare market by 2020, an increase of $20.4 billion since 2013. Among rural Medicare recipients alone, the number of telemedicine visits increased from just over 7,000 in 2004 to nearly 108,000 in 2013.

Due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, health care professionals saw a rise of patients booking non-urgent consultations with their doctors. According to the Journal of the American Informatics Association, virtual urgent care visits at NYU Langone Health grew by 683 percent and nonurgent virtual-care visits grew by a staggering 4,345% between March, 2nd to April,14th of 2020. This type of treatment is becoming one of the primary ways doctors are seeing their patients and has proven to be successful. This type of digital interaction keeps both parties safe and is a reliable way that physicians plan to use for routine checks even after the pandemic ends. Telemedicine also displays online health records for both the patient and the doctor. They both have access to the relevant information at all times if a situation ever arises. This means that patient data is more readily accessible to healthcare professions and can be analyzed more leading to better and smarter treatment plans for the patient. This carves the path for a more personalized healthcare system, in which patients can better understand their conditions and could result in more positive outcomes.

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

The global Augmented Reality (AR) & Virtual Reality (VR) in healthcare market size was valued at USD 568.7 million in 2016 and is projected to grow at a rate of 29.1% to the year 2025. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) can be thought of as two different technologies. With AR, the user will not fall out of touch with reality and displays information in their environment in real-time. These technologies have revolutionized the healthcare industry with their adoption in virtual training of surgeons for difficult surgeries, 3D operating room simulations, phobia buster in mental health treatment, and chronic pain management. VR technology has also played a significant role in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy that enables to reframe traumatic memories through certain eye movements. In addition, this technology offers benefits in various areas of care management: autism & depression therapy, cancer therapy, and assisted living. VR-based organ models have played a crucial part in preparing surgeons for delicate and complicated operations that demand greater precision, fewer complications, & reduced trauma.

Conclusion

As we talked about the different benefits digital healthcare provides as well the soon to be implemented technologies, as a whole we still have a long way to go to realize its full potential. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, some of these technologies such as wearables Devices, 3D Bioprinting, Artificial intelligence, Telemedicine, Augmented reality and Virtual reality would have taken forever to actually come into the industry, but that is not the case for some. Many healthcare companies are being created and are working to solve the issues we are seeing today. Some startups including Babylon Health, whose mission is to put an accessible and affordable health service in the hands of everyone on Earth. By utilizing the right tools, technologies and strategy, healthcare systems can reduce costs, increase operational efficiencies and improve patient outcomes, all while building a system that benefits consumers and providers alike. Hopefully, in the nearby future, we can live in a world where healthcare professions are able to eradicate chronic diseases and provide affordable and accessible healthcare for all.

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