Introduction to Digital Healthcare
Welcome to the magic of digital healthcare. We’ve always heard of ‘Health is Wealth’. With ever evolving technology, everything, including the healthcare industry, is transforming for the better. Patient pain points for receiving care requiring travelling miles, long waiting hours in physician offices, and prolonged clinic/ hospital care management.
With the advent of digital healthcare, patient care has never been quicker and easier. Within minutes, you can consult a doctor, get medicines prescribed, order Tests and get treated, all while sitting within the comforts of your own home. It is no longer necessary to bear the hassle of waiting in the queues to get your turn to meet a doctor for a small ailment. Using just your mobile or your computer, you can meet a doctor, share your health issues, and get professional advice and medicines. Healthcare has become easily accessible to all populations now.
Digital Healthcare scenario
Consider you have uncontrolled hypertension. Now, the doctor has always advised you to take your medications regularly and check your blood pressure daily to make a chart for future reference. You forget to take your medications, which lead to high blood pressure causing headaches, nausea, etc. You have been told adverse effects of hypertension, including stroke. You often forget to monitor your blood pressure too and keep going back to the doctor for consultations with incomplete data. You are getting tired and frustrated with these frequent visits and uncontrolled hypertension.
Role of Digital Healthcare
Digital healthcare comes in handy in such situations. Digital healthcare portals like Active Wellness enables you access a wide range of Consumer Services. It is your virtual health partner at your side 24×7 and generates alerts for Drugs / Tests / primary prevention, etc. The generation of real-time alerts, for medication intake, recording side effects, and effectiveness. Reminders on tests and actions that is due for you like measure biometrics, assessments, task management, etc. It reduces clinic / hospital visits for routine follow-ups. The E-consult functionality provided enables 24×7 anywhere anytime care with your care team. It helps save you time and money. Helps getting urgent advice in health emergencies until your ambulance reaches.
The telehealth functionality coupled with medical records management is a great facilitator to providing care through connected care teams. Virtual visits through digital healthcare platforms enable hassle-free consultations for every minor or major health query. Moreover, both online and clinic consultations can be combined via this portal, allowing you to have hybrid care. Digital patient care has optimized healthcare for everyone. It has become convenient and cost-effective, too. Within the premises of your home, you can get consultation, clear your doubts and concerns, get prescriptions, health advice, dietary plans, and whatnot.
Digital healthcare can be applied to all conditions, be it acute or chronic. You can just make an appointment online with a doctor at any time and ask away any query you have. Be it a chronic condition like diabetes, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, renal failure, hypothyroidism, and the list goes on. A quick access to services to order tests and information on tests, manage medication, complete assessments & evaluations and get opinions for any new sign or symptom, but a few activities.
Digital Ecosystem helps meet a consumer’s emergency and on-going health needs in one place. While it is important to get to the hospital as soon as possible for comprehensive evaluation and treatment, however, immediate start of treatment at the home is precious in such situations. In case of emergency, while you get to the hospital, it is better to consult online and get initial treatment to prevent worsening of the condition, which can save time and money both. All chronic conditions like lifestyle disorders such as diabetes, hypertension obesity etc. can be managed through hybrid care that is a combination of Clinic Visits and online visits.
What Makes US Healthy:
This is aptly brought out by the info graphic below:
What Comprises Digital Healthcare
Digital healthcare is a broad vision of the confluence of technology and health provision services. It is the incorporation of software and technology into the healthcare system. It includes:
- Personalized health
- Virtual Care teams
- On-going risk assessment and monitoring
- Real Time Communication with care teams
- Engagement & Empowerment consumers on health
- Mobile health applications
- Electronic health records
- Electronic medical records
- Monitoring devices
- Telehealth
- Telemedicine
Each component has its own importance in making this system user-friendly, convenient, and easy to use.
Active Wellness Digital Health
Start with an easy to setup account on Active Wellness, get membership, and start your healthcare journey. Creating an account is free for basic needs. However there are different health plans and packages available to suit your needs. Different packages have functionalities. These, in brief, are:
- Digital screening for primary prevention of disease (helping you achieve an optimal state of health where the likelihood of getting a specific disease is minimized)
- Digital screening for secondary prevention (minimizing the severity of an existing illness/disease)
- Diet & Physical Activity charts (customized according to your health requirements)
- Virtual doctor (you can consult a doctor online to ask any query you have about the disease you have or any new symptom that you are experiencing)
- Real-time Alerts – Reminders for compliance to medicine, healthy food, and physical activity
- Identify gaps in care and keep track of your health, and predict risk scores and gaps to prevent the development of a disease
- Biometric monitoring tools for making a trend chart of your chronic diseases so that over time, with optimal therapy, you can manage your disease in a better way. These can continue for a long period of time, even for your whole life.
- Personalised Care plans for specialized treatment plans for all age groups and gender, including new mothers and infants.
- Reminders and information regarding laboratory tests, vaccination and immunizations, and much more.
- Focus on Women’s Health.
- Monitor child’s growth & development across growth, mental, social, and developmental milestones.
These and much more are included in the care plans that are just a click away. Subscribe now.
A special feature of Active Wellness digital healthcare is that you can use it anytime, anywhere.
- Access a doctor at your home workplace, during travel, on the road, literally anywhere.
- Have a distributed care team. To manage different facts of your health.
- Manage your health both, prevention and disease mgmt., healthy nutrition, physical activity and so on.
- You can add your physician to your care team by asking him to join and access your record.
- Hybrid care enables you to opt to meet a doctor in the clinic or virtually and consult your queries and health conditions, be it acute or chronic. They will guide you according to your condition and satisfy your queries.
Global healthcare outlook vs. Digital healthcare
Women’s Health through Femtech:
11 million women become pregnant each year. Delivery of healthcare to all of these women and their children, especially those who live in remote districts, has always been a challenge. Active Wellness – Women’s Health can help to bring much-needed health care to their doorstep, protecting the most vulnerable group of the community. Access through mobile has been devised that can help women to keep track of their pregnancy, the investigations, and consultation that are required at a certain time to check on maternal and foetal health. It is augmented with preventive care and screenings to help check for onset of lifestyle diseases and cancers. Mobile virtual Care enables patients can have online consultations with their physicians.
Why Child Health:
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children has taken the initiative to provide healthcare to children in remote communities of the world. The Digital Health Centre of Excellence led by UNICEF and WHO has been working to provide better health services and vaccinations to remote areas of the world, especially after the pandemic. It is also working on improving the diagnostics, and health services and decreasing the spread of false information. According to the National Institute of Child and Healthcare, Providing health services to children, particularly timely vaccinations and early response in case of fatal diseases, is the central action taken to improve child health using digital means.
What is Health Engagement
Manage Lifestyle Disorders:
Most of the lifestyle disorders like cardiovascular diseases can be prevented by lifestyle modifications like quitting smoking, eating healthy, and moderate physical activity. Cardiovascular disorders are the cause of 31% of deaths globally per annum, which can be easily prevented by changes in lifestyle.
Digital healthcare helps in the self-management of lifestyle disorders with kin support by using simple means like text messaging, applications to monitor food and water intake, exercises, and repetition of tests after a certain time. Digital interventions have an incredible potential to improve healthcare delivery by adequacy, personalization, self-monitoring, and self-motivation.
Mental Health Is A concern:
Digital mental health care services like tele-coaching and tele-therapy gained acceptance during the COVID-19 pandemic and have shown a major improvement in controlling symptoms of depression.
Suicide helplines have been established all over the world, where people who are at risk of committing suicide can talk to their therapist. Online therapy sessions have particularly proven beneficial for illnesses like anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorders. Digital Healthcare believes in augmented health, the goal of which is to provide continuous behavioural health monitoring, real-time interventions, on-demand support, and remote visits to psychiatrists or therapists.
Where Asia Stands:
Digital Healthcare at Active Wellness
As a consumer of digital health care at Active Wellness, we offer multiple healthcare services that you can take benefit from. It offers a wide of range of services from customized nutrition & diet plans and physical activity, track records of your health and chronic diseases, treatment plans for your specific health conditions, and much more. In order to get more ideas about our innovative and disruptive technology, the way we deliver our healthcare services, and overall, a better understanding of digital healthcare platforms, visit our Portal Active Wellness. Moreover, you can also take a look at all our providers, who make digital healthcare easy, convenient, and yet professional for our consumers.
Conclusion
To conclude, digital healthcare is the future of healthcare to keep people healthy and reduce/ delay the onset of morbidity and mortality. The Active Wellness Platform strives to deliver quality care and treatment to our public consumers. The Connected care Ecosystem ensures the provision of exceptional technology driven healthcare services to consumers. You can get customized plans for you and your loved ones, track your health record, get treatment plans, order lab tests, and much more, all while sitting within the comforts of your own home. Take care of your health and allow us to do it professionally for you.
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Dr. B S Grewal
MD, MPH, MPhil, OCP
CEO Active Wellness
Website: https://activewellness.in
