Behavior Change Driving Digital Health is Bubbling Up from the Bottom

This week marks one month since ePharma Summit 2016 opened and closed. It’s a good time to reflect on a final takeaway from the conference and close my notebook.

Clearly, there is more grand thinking about the future and emphasis on the promise of digital health at this point than in the celebration of successes. But that isn’t to say there aren’t a few current successes and some projects underway that will start to bear fruit even as I write this.

The most important aspect of digital health that I learned at the Summit was that patients are truly at the center of any advances in the use of healthcare technology to achieve lower cost, higher quality and improved outcomes. After all, it’s the patients who need answers who are behind the rapid uptake  of any promising health or wellness application that might offer hope, support, and solid answers.

Stupid Cancer Show founder Matthew Zachary said emphatically he has legions of Millennials with cancer using apps and participating in peer support who freely offer their information for healthcare professionals who can use it to advance a cure. It’s there for the taking, and it is being offered enthusiastically.

Another informational session featured the developers and founders of GI Health, an app that helps diagnose and support patients who have GI symptoms so they can provide accurate and potentially life-saving information to their gastroenterologists.

On the marketing side, another app tracks physician online interactions to help pharmaceutical companies get product information to prescribers at the point of making treatment decisions.

The bottom line here is that there are plenty of players from the patient, provider and payer worlds who already have their heads in the game. Expect any moment that this 24/7 interactivity with health information will reach critical mass and change the whole game of caring for patients.