Digital health is an exciting and fast-growing field, but it isn’t without its challenges. As technology advances and more healthcare organisations move to digital solutions, several obstacles must be overcome to ensure digital health solutions are practical and secure.
Data Security and Privacy
One of the biggest challenges in digital health is data security and privacy. Previous years saw some of the most significant cybersecurity breaches in healthcare history, with over 22.6 million patients affected by healthcare-related data breaches in 2021.
These attacks involve stealing patient data, preventing access to management systems or even affecting life-preserving equipment.
As healthcare organisations move to digital solutions, they need to ensure the data they
store and transmit is secure. This means ensuring the data is encrypted, access is restricted to authorised personnel and all access is logged. It’s also critical to ensure that all data is stored in compliance with local and international regulations.
Ease of Use
Another challenge facing the healthcare industry is ensuring technology’s easy to use. Digital health solutions must be user-friendly to be effective, providing the user interface is intuitive, the user experience is positive and the system is easy to use. It’s also important to ensure that users are properly trained to be comfortable using the system.
Demonstrating the quick adoption of this technology, 90% of NHS Trusts are expected to have an electronic patient record (EPR) in place by 2023. While millions of pounds are being spent on this new infrastructure, there’s little in the way of training or time to get used to the new system, which can massively impact patient safety, time spent with patients, data quality and governance.
Scalability
As more trusts adopt this new technology, it’s become clear that digital health solutions must be scalable and robust. As healthcare organisations move to digital solutions, they need to ensure the solutions can handle an increase in data and users, are reliable and resilient and can adapt to changing requirements.
PwC identified three main factors for the scalability of digital health:
- Taking a platform approach — Digital health is more successful when its value is focused across a portfolio rather than on a single device or service.
- Preparing the back-end — Effective back-end processes must support these technologies to enable operations at scale.
- Empowering markets — There needs to be a balance between global development and getting the right approach to launching in local markets, so the technology finds favour with its users.
Evolving Patient Needs
Investing in improving hospital patient experience isn’t new — it’s been a priority for many years. Providing a positive patient experience has proven to impact healthcare outcomes, create efficiencies, preserve resources, limit healthcare service utilisation and ease workloads.
Some of the most common frustrations faced by NHS staff and patients can be relieved by investing in modern improvements that can make a real difference.
When bedside units were first installed, they were a great way to keep hospitalised patients entertained. 20 years later, time has reduced the quality of this useful resource which makes them less optimal for the patient than before. Investing in more up-to-date bedside technology solutions can massively improve the hospital and patient experience.
The Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
In the coming years, automation will become the driving force behind the healthcare industry, revolutionising how digital workflows, patient check-in and care delivery are managed. This will drastically impact the patient experience, changing it forever. By 2023, the full effects of automation will be felt in the healthcare sector.
However, one issue facing AI is that there are no established standards for verifying and validating AI systems. AI models can also struggle with generalisation, so replicating results on ‘limited’ training sets in real-world cases may not be possible. This can lead to potential errors, patient harm, bias risk and health inequalities.
These are just some of the biggest challenges in digital health, but they’re all essential to consider when designing and implementing digital health solutions. Though there are challenges, digital health can revolutionise healthcare and provide a better experience for patients and healthcare professionals with the right strategies and investment.
About the author
Hannah Wilson is a Marketing Executive at WiFi SPARK, industry leaders offering quality enterprise WiFi solutions, including their healthcare solution SPARK® Media that aims to make patient entertainment free. Hannah has written extensively on healthcare, including patient engagement and entertainment, as well as the benefits of technology and innovation.
