MJ Chehade, creator of the virtual clinic at an Australian hospital, presents experience on the Digital Health Hub project, promoted by Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council funding for the Centre for Research Excellence in Frailty and Healthy Ageing.
The newsletter initially responds to the problem of multimorbidity, when individuals have more than one diagnosed chronic disease. This relates not only to health characteristics but also to those related to socioeconomic, cultural, environmental and behavioral factors.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes efforts to create complex models of care involving different health and social care disciplines. The newsletter captures various experiences and perspectives from a community of professionals from different disciplines, highlighting the “importance of patient agency in driving the evolution of health services that are empowered by improved, digitally enabled strategies for patient education.”
Community-driven progress. New health care practices no longer rely solely on health personnel, there is now greater access to health information that has allowed for greater participation of patients and their carers (formal, as nurses or informal, as family members).
Patient education. In its Report on Human Resources for Health: Workforce 2030, WHO outlines the challenges to achieving universal health coverage. One of them is the training of health personnel, the workforce would empower the collection and use of Big Data, for example, or Applied Artificial Intelligence in Health, “WHO introduced digital health as a broad term to encompass health services provided electronically (eHealth), including mobile health technology solutions (mHealth), as well as emerging areas, such as the advanced use of computing sciences to manage big data, genomics and artificial intelligence systems,” they explain in the newsletter. The challenge is the processing of this type of data collected through digital media.
The proposal of the Personal Digital Health hubto interpret information and achieve easy integration of the various health services is a key proposal for the resolution of WHO's challenges. “This personalized hub is potentially a powerful tool, empowering patients to take greater control of their health goals,” they mention in the newsletter. The existence of adaptive software for the creation of such digital centers that are already used in education systems, would be an important step forward to adapt them to the needs of health services in each country.
Among the experiences is the Royal Adelaide Hospital in Australia, where they designed a virtual clinic and a digital health center for patients with a transdisciplinary approach: “Input was provided from clinical disciplines (geriatrics, orthopedics, emergency medicine, anesthesiology, rehabilitation medicine, general practice, nursing, allied health and pharmacy); non-clinical disciplines (health economics, computer science, higher education, mathematics, architecture and demography); and patient and consumer groups. We used a collaborative and co-design approach to translate our knowledge and experience into successful health outcomes.”
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