HomeCategoryDigital Health Archives -

A Change Is Needed In May 2018, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published an editorial calling for a paradigm shift in the deployment of preventive interventions. The key points are: Clinical studies have proven behavioural interventions, such as the Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP), to be highly effective. These interventions are being adopted very slowly owing to old financing models by payors and scalability challenges for providers. Digital interventions can overcome these barriers and...

There’s no escaping it: the digital age is in full swing. Everyone, regardless of age, owns or has access to a smartphone, tablet, computer, laptop, digital TV, and other pieces of technology designed to inform, entertain, and make life a bit easier and comfier. The majority of children today are exposed to technology not only in their homes but in their schools as well. Because of this, a registered clinical psychologist from Sydney points out...

The importance of digitization has been pretty well understood for quite a while now, but some businesses and industries are still hesitant to go through it. The healthcare industry is one such example, but given the security threats technology poses, it’s quite understandable. With advancements in software and server security, healthcare can now fully take advantage of digitization. It should be realized that healthcare is a trillion dollar industry spread over hospital care, clinical services,...

“As a doctor, it is my duty to evaluate the situation with as much data as I can gather and as much expertise as I have and as much experience as I have to determine whether or not the wish of the patient is medically justified” This quote would be so great and remarquable today in the time of big data and digital health revolution if it would not have be written by Dr Jack...

Jonathon Burton, web and digital services manager at Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, talks about the Trust’s online therapeutic and social networking platform, initially designed for people with eating disorders. Mental health issues are 24/7, 365 days a year, but unless you are acutely ill in hospital, support services tend to be 9 to 5 with crisis services providing out of hours care.  In 2009, mental health services for eating disorders weren’t as readily available...

Digitalization is going to disrupt the Healthcare industry as much if not more than it disrupted the traditional musical industry in the last two decade. Many actual signs confirm that analogy and the key difference would only be the speed of the major changes. It is up to the different partners in the healthcare industry from hospitals and doctors to pharmacies and other drug or medical devices manufacturers around the patients to decide if it...

The “How” In Part 1 of this series, I debunked common misconceptions around using data to improve clinical trials. In Part 2, I discussed the validation of digital health tools, and how to tell which tools might actually enact behavior change. Now, in Part 3, I’d like to look at how pharmaceutical companies can actually build a step-by-step plan for implementing data-driven and agile clinical trial processes that will save time and money. In an attempt to strip down...

In Part 1, I discussed common misconceptions behind why pharmaceutical companies aren’t using data to improve clinical trials processes. Firstly, people often think that digital health solutions are young and unreliable – but in fact, there are options on the market that are incredibly robust and often unknown due to a crowded consumer market.   Second, many executives believe that aggregating data points across multiple sources is cumbersome. That, too, is a misconception. In fact, there are...

Common misconceptions One of the biggest problems facing the pharmaceutical industry right now is overspending on clinical trials.According to a study published in April 2015 by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, pharmaceutical development companies spend between $4 and $6 billion each year in unnecessary clinical trial expenses. The problem of inefficient clinical trials is widespread, too: the report found that 1 in 4 trials (24.7%) are inefficient and wildly expensive, and much of this...