Digital Therapeutics (DT) is a domain of healthcare & therapy that adopts digital/online modes to interact, track progress real-time, receive instant feedback/alerts, and provide precise, personalized interventions promptly to either predict, prevent, delay, or manage a particular chronic medical condition.
These solutions are based on technology and monitor patient activity and social interaction to detect and intervene when required, in the form of tools such as:
- Smartphone applications (apps)
- Wearable devices (tracking sensors)
- Web-based studies
- Social networks
- Behavioural science
- Telemedicine platforms
In the modern world today, digital technology has this tremendous potential to reckon with: the bandwidth to generate terabytes of data!
Also, there is the major issue of the cost of pharmaceuticals, in the health-care budget, to improve and maintain the health of patients.
Globally, the areas of major clinical concern have come to include that of the management of chronic and lifestyle disorders, no thanks to their high prevalence and unfavourable consequences.
Our overburdened health-care industry would breathe a sigh of relief is its existing treatments could be replaced and the clinical outcomes improved, by harnessing this digital technology.
To know more about the need and advantages of DT, let’s dive into this blog!
Digital therapeutics has a lot of advantages, but the most important include:
- Direct access to patients
- Decreased cost of treatment
- Encouragement to habituate healthy lifestyle modifications
- Substitute or complement conventional treatments
Among people from all socioeconomic groups, health expenditure
- Was higher for chronic diseases than for infectious diseases
- Was higher in private sector services than public sector services
- Was incurred as out-of-pocket expenses
- Falls unevenly on the poor lending financial vulnerability
As the burden of chronic diseases—in terms of morbidity and finances more so for the developing world—is enormous, digital health-care technologies can contribute to reducing the health-care costs and improve the treatment outcome, especially for lifestyle and chronic diseases.
As a considerable percentage of the Indian population suffers from chronic/non-communicable/lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, heart diseases, obesity, hypertension, smoking, and chronic respiratory disorders…
…the proliferation of digital technologies in the health-care industry can make it easily affordable, accessible, and sustainable to further improve the health and overall quality of life for those living with a chronic condition!