Technology in health: 5 ways it can be successfully used in the field of eHealth

The technological evolution together with the recent shift towards online services have led to the development of eHealth, the healthcare practice supported by digital processes and communication. But eHealth is much more than simply using information technologies to access medical services or exchange medical information online or through an app. Learn more about the digital revolution in healthcare and how disruptive technologies can be used to benefit doctors and patients.

eHealth, that is the use of innovative communication and information technology to improve or enable health and healthcare, is part of a revolutionary process that is known as the digital revolution in healthcare and is helping health services all over the world to have a more personalised and patient-centric approach, as well as allowing patients to access healthcare wherever they are despite the pandemic or any other type of limitation. It has been estimated that the potential of eHealth could lead to less outpatient prescription errors, a decrease in adverse drug events and an increase in available beds.

But these are far from being the sole advantages of the use of technology in health: with these new innovative resources, healthcare can be guaranteed to people in remote areas and to the less fortunate, and automation or telecommunications are even able to generate new treatments to improve the life of patients. Potentially, if this is available in the native language of patients, it means that healthcare can reach anyone in need. Together with translation for medical purposes, medical interpreting and remote interpreting for medical purposes, localised eHealth resources can make a difference for patients all over the world, hence why the role of LSPs in this process is so crucial.

Now let’s take a look at the most promising technologies and at the different ways they can change the life of doctors and patients if implemented in eHealth.

1. Empowering patients with AR. One of the most difficult aspects for patients is often how to describe their symptoms to doctors to help them make an accurate diagnosis. EyeDecide is a good example of how technology and healthcare can go hand in hand: 3D animation and AR have been introduced in a patient education app to reproduce symptoms of particular conditions. In this application, the camera display simulates the impact of certain conditions on your vision, particularly Age-related Macular Degeneration and Cataracts, helping patients to understand how vision deteriorates. This might not be applicable to all conditions, but definitely helps patients to recognise how a potential disease would impact on their life.
2. Empowering doctors with AR. Precision is key in surgery, so it is important that surgeons are well-trained in conducting procedures. Medsights Tech has developed a software to test the feasibility of using AR to create accurate three-dimensional tumour reconstructions, to basically give doctors x-ray capacity without radiation in real time.
3. Enhanced, personalised treatment with digital twin technology. Despite the huge advances in medicine, therapies can still be ineffective for a high number of patients, as they are prepared for the “average patient” but not for the actual one. The digital twin is another technology used in medicine and concretely could be the first step through personalised medicine and the focus on the actual patient. The idea is to have a virtual representation of the real patient to study the optimal treatment for that patient and the progression to establish corrective actions or preventive measures. Have a look at this digital twin of the heart created by Siemens Healthineers, made and trained thanks to a huge database with over 250 million annotated images, reports and operational data, that eventually enables the design of digital heart models based on patient data (and parameters such as size, contraction, etc.) to select the best therapy for the patient.
4. Showing complexities of the body with 3D. 3D animation has proved to be successful in providing a faithful representation of the human body. It can also be used to communicate advantages and disadvantages of therapy options, and to illustrate processes or dynamics that cannot be represented with other media. 3D medical animation is a way for healthcare providers and life science companies not only to educate patients, but also to achieve visibility with interactive solutions and even use it as a marketing tool.
5. Immersive virtual reality for training. Immersive experiences have proved to be memorable and are especially helpful for training and education purposes. Virtual reality in healthcare is present in many applications, such as virtual patient simulators used to plan for surgeries, to improve balance in patients with Parkinson’s disease or to train doctors for surgical procedures. In this video from our technical partner you will see how VR is used to build a simulation of the human body:

These are just some of the applications of technology in health your life science company, healthcare organisation or pharma business can benefit from (and in every language). Talk to CPSL if you want to be part of the digital revolution in healthcare.

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