Redefining Healthcare – How COVID-19 Brought Digital Medicine To The Forefront

With the second wave of COVID-19 rapidly spreading across the U.S. and abroad, it is hard to imagine a post-COVID life at this time. The pandemic has already instilled some valuable lessons for America’s healthcare community which are starting to re-shape how medical services will be provided going forward. These changes place greater emphasis on outcomes vs. processes with less focus on symptom treatment and more holistic patient care.

Part of the rise in comprehensive patient care comes from the focus on both Virtual Healthcare and Telemedicine. Some in the healthcare industry define Virtual Care as a broad term that encompasses all the ways that healthcare providers remotely interact with their patients. Telemedicine, as they see it, is a subset of Virtual Care, referring specifically to remote diagnosis and the treatment of various medical conditions, including medical advice, or referring patients to a specialist.

Digital health products focused on virtual care or telemedicine have become integral to the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and management of health and disease, especially in our current climate. Clinicians are using digital health products to gain insights on patient outcomes, conduct telehealth visits, and treat aspects of diseases otherwise unaddressed by traditional medications.

Another paradigm that is emerging out of these industry trends is Digital Medicine. Fundamentally, digital medicine is the segment of evidence-based digital health tools that measure and/or intervenes in the service of healthcare. Digital medicine supports the practice of medicine broadly to include treatment, recovery, disease prevention, and health promotion for individual patients and across large populations.