How digital health tools have shifted the paradigm of medicine since COVID-19

Joost Bruggeman, co-founder and CEO of Siilo explores three main categories of care currently being aided by digital tools: distance diagnosis, internal communications and external collaborations.

According to analyses done by Gartner, the healthcare industry has made massive shifts to adopt new, safer hospital practices in response to COVID-19. Because physical contact and proximity present such risks, hospitals are turning to a variety of digital tools in order to meet their care priorities, such as risk reduction and better resource utilisation. Having a better understanding of these priorities and what tools hospitals are using now will help us in the healthtech industry know what to build for them next.

At Siilo, we believe that putting tried and true technology into the hands of healthcare professionals will result in a higher quality of care for patients down the line. However, we also believe that these tools must be built to handle the security standards and needs specific to the industry, so we’ve taken a look at three major categories of care currently being aided by digital tools: distance diagnoses, internal communications, and external collaborations.

Distance diagnoses

COVID-19 was not the start of the telehealth revolution, but it was certainly a major driver in its widespread adoption this year. While doctors and specialists cannot see their patients in person, that doesn’t mean people haven’t stopped needing consultations. Moving diagnoses online is the only option to continue delivering care directly to patients.

Telehealth services can include anything from patient portals, where individuals can email their doctors in a secure online environment, to mobile applications, allowing doctors to hold virtual appointments with patients via video call. They can also include the collection of health data, voluntarily given by patients, through the Internet of Things, such as smartwatches, in order to get a more holistic view of the patient’s wellbeing.

Advances in telehealth can certainly ease the burdens on healthcare professionals looking to safely diagnose their patients over digital platforms, but we need to make sure that we are providing products that prioritise data safety. That means designing for GDPR compliance incorporating key features, like passcode protection and device-only data storage.

Internal communications

The influx of telehealth and digital solutions for communicating with patients has also resulted in a professional counterpart for members of medical institutions, organisations, and associations all across Europe. Beyond the EHRs and secure email servers typically found in hospitals or physicians’ offices, technology is being developed to make communication by modern healthcare professionals more efficient, more secure, and more informative.

People bring their smartphones to work with them, and as such, we see professionals increasingly seeking out mobile tools and applications to simplify their workflows. In particular, professionals are looking for ways to quickly exchange information with each other and their departments at large. Teams are picking up messaging apps to stay up to date with each other, manage shifts and handovers, and more in hospitals and clinics. They can exchange messages, images and videos, and even entire patient files with a few taps, so it is no wonder that messengers have become so popular.

This integration is not seamless, however. Bring-your-own-device policies, such as those found in Germany and France, have been put in place to limit the chances of cross-contaminating patient data and personal information, and increasing digital literacy amongst professionals can be a difficult and time-consuming endeavour. Nevertheless, hospitals and other institutions should be prepared for a staff-led push to adopt newer technology that simplify workflows and increase connectivity between colleagues. Messengers are already in use, secure or not, so we need to make strategizing a shift from common-use apps to ones designed with healthcare stands in mind.

External collaborations

Patients travel in and out of institutional walls all the time, and so does their information. However, moving patient data can be an incredibly time-consuming and frustrating relay race. This is why professionals are actively seeking digital methods to cut down on the number of steps it takes to move one file from one location to another, while still maintaining the data security necessary to protect that data.

We’ve seen that the tools used to simplify communication and connection within hospitals can also be used to streamline the referral and consultation processes with external specialists. Messenger apps, for example, can cut down on valuable time by allowing specialists, GPs, and hospital staff to contact one another directly to discuss a patient transfer. Building enough of these connections can then facilitate the creation of referral networks, allowing healthcare professionals to effectively distribute patients to colleagues with the bandwidth to properly care for them.

In addition, building the infrastructure for network creation facilitates the sharing of knowledge beyond teams, departments, and even specialisations. Professionals can share the most recent research in their fields, discuss national policies, and solicit advice on edge cases via case-based networks. Learning from our peers in real-time allows us to maintain a high quality of care for patients and also strengthens the relationships we have with colleagues, and building these networks serves the additional purpose of creating a knowledge repository that can be referenced again and again.

User-provider connectivity

Digital tools are increasingly an essential part of hospital work. We need to continue providing secure, efficient options to healthcare professionals and hospitals in order to facilitate this shift. Those options can take many forms, but above all, those of us in healthtech must actively work with modern healthcare professionals to ensure that our solutions match their problems. Only then can we fully capture the power of technology to make an impact on patient care.