The Decade of Digital Health – Score Points

The pandemic has obliged to carry out telematically many medical consultations that in normal cases have present side effects. The Mayor has been on the phone, but he has also used other media, video conferencing and e-mail using the popular WhatsApp. In the United States, the task of telematic consultations between January and June 2020 increased by more than 2000% (from 0.8 to 17.8 visits per 1000 users, in absolute values), according to an analysis of 16.7 million users published by JAMA Internal Medicine. Sanitary attention at the time of covid-19 is showing that medical-communication can definitely open up to digital channels, but this opening is only the most visible manifestation of a more profound digital movement affecting all sanitary medicine.

The economic sector of health care is the limit “Industry” which does not allow for the digital revolution of consumption, where it has been installed since 20 years ago tourism, trade at least and has the bank, the penultimate in reading. The sanitary attention has not given this step because the health is not a good consumption and because the personal medical data are especially sensitive. Without embarrassment, the possibilities that offer digital services to universalize sanitary assistance and increase the health of its population are unaffordable. Some people are reluctant to send recorders to the embassies in order for them to go through the prenatal audits or the parents in order to live up to their vacancies, approving the amplification of mobile phones throughout the world. There are other complexes, such as the implantation of standardized electronic electronic histories, telediagnostic systems and artificial intelligence devices. And some other quizzes are unimaginable.

The technological giants are currently taking positions in a deal estimated at one trillion (one million by millions) of dollars, according to a recent article published in The Economist. So, for example, Amazon has given an eEUU step-by-step approach to selling drugs that accurately prescribe drugs over its new Amazon Pharmacy brand, while Apple continues to push the development of new high-end personal health outreach applications . Everything points to the fact that the digitalisation of medicine has to go hand in hand with the collaboration between the technological companies and the different systems, organizations and providers of sanitary services.

In 2019, the Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS), the public recommendation is sober intervention of the salud digital paragraph, the sanitary sanitary cooperation and the medicine of the digital technological use of the telecommunication devices. These recommendations, directed primarily to those in charge of health policies, from basic and essential questions such as electronic notification of births and defects, to the use of telemedicine and health training applications. The guise of the OMS alerts of indiscriminate enthusiasm about digital assets; I highly recommend these conditions and generally form a complementary to the traditional ones, and recommend that their implantation is always done while evaluating the balance between risks and benefits, an aspect in which much is needed to be done.

The taxes imposed by covid-19 have increased the demand for digital services and products, and could mean a definite impetus to digital health during this decade of 2020. But these are herramentic, like any other technological development in the history of medicine, no fines in its own right, its means to increase the health care that deben be evaluated in impartial form.

The author: Gonzalo Casino is licensed and doctor in Medicine. Work as a researcher and professor of scientific periodism at the Pompe Fabra University of Barcelona.