Navigating the digital revolution in healthcare: Insights from our conference in Switzerland

Digital health proposes a future in which healthcare is more personalised and efficient. However, there are significant challenges to this vision. Our participation and attendance at the Digital Health Innovation Conference provided us with unique insights into the technologies, trends and future directions that healthcare may take.

About the conference

In May 2023, the Digital Health Innovation Conference was held at the Novartis Pavilion in Basel, Switzerland, which we had the honour to initiate and co-organise from the very beginning. The conference featured representatives and experts from both promising startups and established companies in the healthcare and drug development industry, including Novartis itself.

About Digital Health

The field of digital health is very broad and includes, for example, electronic health records, mobile applications, telemedicine, wearables, data analytics including predictive modelling and AI-based diagnostics. Each of these areas brings unique challenges and opportunities. From increasing patient engagement to enabling predictive analytics, the conference illuminated the myriad ways in which digital innovation is changing the shape of healthcare. However, it also highlighted that significant investment in time, resources and ongoing education is required to truly harness these innovations.

A Glimpse Into The Future

From an AI-based solution that can alert doctors to potential findings on X-rays, to lectures on super-fast searches in molecular space or new opportunities in the cancer patient journey, to a presentation describing the potential pitfalls of the rapid development of artificial intelligence. The main takeaway from each presentation was that the opportunities for digital healthcare are significant. However, the processes that can make innovation more effective are not only those on the patient side (whether it's mobile apps that help people going through a cancer diagnosis, for example, or solutions that provide remote communication with a doctor), but also on the side of healthcare professionals and staff themselves. Indeed, in many cases, healthcare staff spend a noticeable amount of their working hours on routine processes that can be greatly streamlined by digital innovations. As an example from our own experience, we can mention a solution for streamlining the application system that we created for the largest primary healthcare provider in the Czech Republic.

Digital Health: A Journey With Many Obstacles

Implementing digital innovation in healthcare has its challenges. The implementation of digital health solutions goes well beyond application and software development. It primarily involves integrating these advanced solutions into existing systems and workflows and ensuring that they support, not disrupt, each other. Our work for clients in the healthcare industry has highlighted the complexity of such integration, which requires both meeting various regulations and standards and ensuring seamless connectivity to legacy healthcare systems. Meeting regulations and standards that are in place largely to protect patient data is often not such a problem for a modern, robust solution. However, many healthcare providers are working with systems that, while reliable, are not quite ready for the digital age. Moreover, the challenge lies not only in creating a kind of bridge between legacy and modern systems, but also in dealing with data, specifically large amounts of sensitive data.

The introduction of these technologies is thus not only a question of innovation, but also of overcoming financial and implementation obstacles. The costs associated with developing, integrating and maintaining advanced digital health solutions for healthcare are significant.

An Indispensable Human Element

However, amidst all the technical and regulatory complexities of digital health integration, the human element remains a priority. It's not just about the approach to patients - a form of doctor-patient communication - it's also about the use of various digital health technologies. Today, there are advanced systems based on machine learning that can reliably identify all sorts of anomalies in X-rays or skin scans, for example, but a definitive exclusion or diagnosis must always be made by a medical professional.

Conclusion

Implementing digital health is a long journey with its own challenges and obstacles. At the same time, it is a journey with enormous potential that can streamline various processes in healthcare, save time for both patients and staff, and most importantly - save lives.