Promoting Health Equity Digitally

CIO Review APAC | Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Digital health solutions have the potential to make healthcare more equitable.

FREMONT, CA:Equal access to affordable and competent healthcare could improve patient outcomes by enhancing patient quality of life, reducing the need for emergency and late-stage interventions, and preventing premature deaths.  Efforts to increase health equity have the potential to greatly benefit from the use of digital technologies. Rapidly developing technology, however, has the potential to deteriorate exclusion, create unanticipated biases, widen the digital divide, and keep some groups behind.

Equalising healthcare access and quality benefits the economy as a whole because it allows patients to live active, productive lives and enhances individual and population-level results. Over the past century, improvements in global health have accounted for a third of all economic development in advanced economies. Digital health solutions must be created to reach previously excluded or underrepresented groups to maintain this growth rate.

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Digital tools can be crucial in closing equity gaps. However, the process takes a lot of effort. Digital health entrepreneurs might start to imagine how their solution can address health equity by drawing inspiration from start-ups and established leaders in the industry. By expanding access to healthcare, addressing unmet needs, personalising care for patients, and taking into account the historical context of the communities they serve, digital tools can increase equity. To create and expand their products to have a significant impact, digital health innovators can benefit from understanding these three areas of potential.

Digital technology can reduce the equity gap in several ways, including expediting complex medical bureaucracy procedures and removing travel and transportation barriers to healthcare. The two main barriers to access are availability and pricing.

Barriers to care include high treatment costs and restricted insurance coverage. For instance, inadequate coverage by health insurers for fertility procedures makes in vitro fertilisation (IVF) unaffordable for many individuals. the start-up in digital health Univfy is attempting to reduce those costs in two ways: first, by creating an AI-based platform that forecasts a patient's likelihood of success, and second, by collaborating with clinics to provide refunds if IVF attempts are unsuccessful.

Treatment options might be constrained even when patients overcome financial and geographical obstacles to care because of variations in physician knowledge and patients' reactions to therapies. For instance, inaccurate data and a discrepancy between provider knowledge and the clinical presentation of the disease might make it difficult to diagnose and treat rare diseases. As a result, "diagnostic odysseys" that often last longer than five years may result. Additionally, a patient's response to therapy after being given a prescription may vary depending on their genetic profile.

Certain individuals may experience paradoxical reactions from biological medications intended to treat autoimmune illnesses, which genetic variations may bring about. Digital health businesses have a chance to address the causes of the few viable treatment alternatives available to huge populations.

Digital innovators have an unrivalled chance to consider health equality more seriously and create fresh solutions to persistent healthcare issues. They must think about how to access disparities and reduce the number of "reachable" patients before deciding which aspect of health inequality their solution might address. The difficult task of creating and putting into practice digital solutions that support the goal of health equity follows. Patients' lives will be improved, healthcare systems will be more effective, and the economy as a whole will benefit from digital entrepreneurs who can make a difference in health fairness.

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