Consumer drive for wellbeing improvements can encourage future use of digital health in patient care, say experts

Collette Johnson, businesses development manager medical at Plextek Consulting, said that digital health providers will find it easier to convince the NHS to buy into their innovations if they first drive consumer demand for those services. She said consumer lobbying can help drive the NHS to open itself up to digital health adoption.

Johnson was speaking at an event hosted by Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, on mobile health (m-health) opportunities. Johnson has been involved in encouraging m-health adoption within the NHS.

Consumers are likely to be more engaged with the concept of digital health if the focus is on improving their 'wellbeing' rather than on treating sickness and illness, David Priestly, sales director at insurer Pru Health, said. Channelling focus in this direction can improve consumer tolerance for digital health solutions, improve health outcomes and ultimately help tackle the "huge problem in our society" posed by chronic diseases, he said.

"We need to remove the dividing lines [between wellbeing and fitness apps and health care]," Priestly said. He said that the success of digital health solutions lies in helping consumers link their "understanding of how healthy they are, their understanding of what they need to do to improve their health, and then their need to access treatment".

The term digital health broadly refers to the practice of using IT to deliver services in the health sector. 'M-health' specifically relates to mobile IT health care provision. Digital and m-health applications vary widely, from engaging in patient records management through tablet devices, to recording patients' heart rate, glucose or blood oxygen levels remotely through applications available on smartphones, to providing medical interventions and diagnostics. In addition, digital health broadly encompasses the growth in popularity of wellbeing mobile applications, such as calorie counters, health eating and fitness apps.

Digital health is being seen as a way for patients to receive some aspects of health care services remotely, enabling advantages to be derived such as cutting waiting times in hospitals and at doctors' surgeries and enabling medical professionals to access more frequent data on patients with chronic illnesses.

Tim Davis, chief executive of Exco InTouch, a leading digital health supplier, said that "frequent flyers" are placing a burden on the NHS that can be alleviated through digital health solutions.

"If you can keep a patient at home and predict problems you can reduce health care costs," he said.

Davis said that a "big driver" of digital health is the potential it has to reduce the costs pharmaceutical companies incur in bringing new products to market. This relates to the ability to gather better quality data about individuals' health.

Technology and information law expert Matthew Godfrey-Faussett of Pinsent Masons said that uncertainty over who will pay for digital health services is a barrier to the success of the digital health market. However, he explained one business model that could emerge.

"Digital health can help mitigate the effects of chronic disease and allows for regular monitoring of patients from home," Godfrey-Faussett said. "The potential is there to encourage patients to submit data themselves on aspects of their health, and it allows the use of call backs and text prompts to help address issues identified and enable patients to manage problems from home."

"One potential funding model could involve specific digital health solutions being prescribed by doctors for a temporary period, say six months," he said. "This allows the NHS to foot an initial cost which, if the trial proves successful, could then be taken on by the user."

Life sciences sector angel investor Andy Richards said that the "investor ecosystem" for m-health businesses is currently "immature". However, he said that there has been a rise in the number of corporate venture capitalists looking to invest in m-health providers and said that this is helping to make "high value exists visible" to angel investors.

Richards contrasted the speed with which investors can see revenue growth from new starts in the "tech world" with the "very slow" process for obtaining returns in the life sciences sector. He said "sophisticated investors" are needed to help guide entrepreneurs through the early stages of their business development.

Godfrey-Faussett said that there are potential wider opportunities stemming from the use of data collected from digital health solutions, such as aggregating data and analysing it to help predict the health problems of the future or informing insurance providers' assessment of risk to personalise premium prices. He said there should be a debate about privacy implications and said that would help consumers "come to terms with the data risk" and help greater take-up of digital health.

Godfrey-Faussett predicted that personal information would in future be increasingly seen by consumers as an asset that they can control and grant access to and use of that data as they see fit. Digital health providers that can "manage regulatory burdens" but ensure they give consumers control over their data in the way their business is structured stand to make the most gains in the market, he said. "Data protection by design will therefore be important", he added.