Digital Medicine

The health industry is on the cusp of a digital revolution. Lee Bell discovers apps that can cure arachnophobia and headsets for overcoming insomnia.

- Lee Bell

Technology plays a crucial role insustaining health. Whether it’s in areas such as surgery, prostheticsor pharmaceuticals, the development of medical devices and equipment over the years has made significant contributions to improving the health of people around the world, enabled by advances in technology.

The fusion of information technology with medicine, often dubbed ‘med tech’, has made significant contributions to the health industry, with innovations ranging from the small and relatively simple, such as adhesive bandages and ankle braces, to larger, more complex technologies including MRI machines, artificial organs and robotic prosthetic limbs.

Thanks to an increased use of electronic medical records (EMR), tele-health services, and mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones, healthcare professionals and patients are starting to benefit from med tech.

But while the health industry has advanced immensely thanks to developments in tech over the last 100 years, that doesn’t mean it’s ahead of the game. The health industry is actually lagging way behind other sectors, such as banking and finance, retail and the media, which are using technology to modernise business practices and bring a plethora of benefits directly to consumers.

This is because the medical industry is notoriously slow in its adoption of new technologies, much to the frustration of executives, physicians and academic scholars who hope to better the industry but lack the technological means to do so. This poses the threat of a serious setback around improvements in patient care and med tech.

However, this issue has not gone unnoticed. The tech start-up scene has been working on ways to modernise the health industry, especially in Sweden, where many developers are working on a number of innovations to speed up the much-needed digital health revolution (see box, above).