The Design Blueprint for a Large-Scale Telehealth Platform

Technological innovation plays a crucial role in digital healthcare services. A growing number of telehealth platforms are concentrating on using digital tools to improve the quality and availability of care. Virtual care solutions employ not only advanced telehealth technology but also a comprehensive range of healthcare services. As a result, these can reduce patient healthcare costs as well as increase accessibility and convenience. At the same time, the healthcare service provider can leverage healthcare professionals to get a better perspective into the needs of their patients. The objective of this research is to provide a comprehensive design blueprint for a large-scale telehealth platform. Telehealth is the digital healthcare service combining online services and offline access for healthcare facilities to offer various healthcare services directly to patients. This design blueprint covers the digital healthcare ecosystem, new patient journey design for digital health services, telehealth functionality design, and an outline of the platform infrastructure and security design. Ultimately, telehealth platforms establish a completed digital healthcare service and new ecosystem that provides better care for every patient worldwide.

My Digital Healthcare Record

In the 21st century, the digital revolution is disrupting every sector of the economy. Australia has adopted the digital healthcare technological revolution such as My Health Record (MyHRC) to improve healthcare practice for clinicians/medical professionals and empower consumers to provide positive health management experience with a patient-centred approach to digital health revolution and digital literacy. My Health Record has its benefits, but it has been a challenge for the healthcare practitioners, hospital staff, as well as patients as consumers to accept, embrace, and uptake digital technologies and manage their healthcare records amidst concerns of slow adoption by the patient, data privacy, and implications of the secondary use of their personal data by non-government entities.

Modeling Digital Healthcare Services Using NLP and IoT in Smart Cities

Smart cities shall have computerized health services to help the treatment of health issues based on a centralized framework. These computerized healthcare services would involve the patient, medical support staff, and doctors. They would have voice recognition clinical staff management, smart health monitoring devices, smart medical reports, and smart medical treatment based on the internet of things (IoT) and natural language processing (NLP). This chapter shall describe the digital healthcare services in the context of NLP and IoT that would help in the improvement of quality of life for people living in smart cities. The authors shall discuss a possible case study on NLP and IoT in digital healthcare in the smart cities.

Smart Health From the Hospital to the City

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the transition of health systems from “hospital” to “city” thanks to smart devices aimed at health promotion through the deployment of ICT in urban contexts. Worldwide, the pandemic has triggered a rethinking of the healthcare system according to the prevention principle, characterized by the usage of advanced technology, which can widely re-orient markets and public action in the field of public and private health services. The chapter will consider the impacts of such innovations and the challenges for the regulatory framework, with a special focus on the Italian context. First, it outlines the main global and EU strategies for digital healthcare. Second, it focuses on the use of smart devices as tools of health prevention. Third, it highlights critical aspects regarding competition and privacy. Finally, the author reflects upon the centrality of the city as a crucial actor for urban health innovation and its upcoming regulatory challenges.

The Digitisation of Healthcare in a Global Pandemic

The chapter discusses the rapid digitisation of healthcare during the COVID-19 global crisis and its implications for healthcare quality from patient, clinician, and provider perspectives. Using the example of patient portals, online interfaces that provide patients with real-time access to their health records, the chapter explores how this large-scale shift to digital healthcare has influenced key elements of healthcare quality. These elements include the safety, timeliness, effectiveness, efficiency, equity, eco-friendliness, and person-centeredness of care delivery, as well as patient and staff well-being. The discussion addresses health anxiety exacerbated by remote service delivery and potential associations with cyberchondria and online search behaviours. Additionally, concerns about digital health literacy, equality of access, patient data privacy, and cybersecurity are discussed in the context of increasing health system shocks. Recommendations are made about how the future adaptation of digital healthcare can support healthcare quality in a post-pandemic era.

A 3-Item Measure of Digital Healthcare Literacy: Development and Validation (Preprint)

BACKGROUND With increased reliance on digital healthcare, including telehealth, efficient and effective ways are needed to assess patients’ comfort and confidence with utilizing these services. OBJECTIVE The goal of this study was to develop and validate a brief scale that assesses digital healthcare literacy. METHODS We first developed an item pool using the existing literature and expert review. We then administered the items to participants as part of a larger study. Participants were caregivers of children receiving care at a pediatric clinic who completed a survey either online or over the phone. We randomized participants into a development and confirmatory sample stratifying by language so that exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) could be performed with a separate sample of participants. We assessed the scale’s validity by examining its associations with participants’ demographics, digital access, and prior digital healthcare use. RESULTS Participants (N=507) were, on average, aged 33.7 (SD 7.7) years and 89% female. Approximately half (55%) preferred English as their primary language, 31% preferred Spanish, and 14% Arabic. Around half (45%) had a high school degree or less and 45% had an annual household income less than US $35,000. Using the EFA, three items were retained in a reduced score with excellent reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.90) and a high variance explained (78%). The reduced scale had excellent CFA fit with factor loadings between 0.82 and 0.94. All fit statistics exceeded the criteria for good fit between the proposed factor structure and the data. We refer to this scale as the Digital Healthcare Literacy Scale (DHLS). The scale was positively associated with education (ρ =0.139, p=.005) and income (ρ =0.379, p<.001). Arabic speakers had lower scores compared to English (p<.001) and Spanish speakers (p=.015), and Spanish speakers had lower scores relative to English speakers (p<.001). Participants who did not own a smartphone (p=0.13) or laptop (p<.001) had lower scores than those who did own these devices. Finally, participants who had not used digital tools, including health apps (p<.001) and video telehealth (p<.001), had lower scores than those who had. CONCLUSIONS Despite the potential for digital healthcare to improve quality of life and clinical outcomes, many individuals may not have the skills to engage with and benefit from it. Moreover, these individuals may be those who already experience worse outcomes. A screening tool like DHLS could be a useful resource to identify patients who require additional assistance to use digital health services and help ensure health equity. CLINICALTRIAL N/A

Innovations in the Management System of the Process of Taking Medicines by Patients Based on Digitalization

In modern conditions, the digitalization of the healthcare sector has increased the pace of development. This is due to the peculiarities of the development of the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to solve issues related to public health more quickly than in the pre-pandemic era. Today, digital healthcare platforms for diagnosis and monitoring of treatment, patient adherence and tracking of medicinal products are new scientific fields. However, innovative technologies and digital solutions are currently not available to all residents of our country, this is due to the ability to access the Internet, the provision of potential patients with PCs and phones with access to the Global Network. Nevertheless, the introduction of these technologies even in the most remote corners of various countries of the world is necessary, since the constant wave-like development of morbidity indicates a long-term prognosis of the spread of coronavirus infection. Accordingly, people must learn to live and fight this disease, and information technologies in the field of medicine can help them in this. The purpose of the work is to consider innovations in the management system of the process of taking medicines by patients based on digitalization.

Preface to the CLEI Electronic Journal Special Issue on Digital Healthcare

This special issue of the CLEI Electronic Journal (CLEIej) is dedicated to Digital Healthcare. It contains two accepted papers presenting research related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America.