One of the oldest but still unresolved problems plaguing the US health system is the uneven distribution of health care.Just past August, a new Learn The Journal of the American Medical Association disclosed the continuing differences in health care expenditures of different races. In particular, mental health care is still difficult to obtain comprehensively, especially for certain groups. Mental health screening is performed in less than 5% of primary care visits, and blacks are half as likely to be tested as whites. Elderly people are also half as likely to be screened as middle-aged patients.
However, new health technologies enable us to enter a new era of equality, improve everyone’s access to health care, remove barriers between people and health care, and by patient In the care center with provider.
Technologies such as virtual care, personal monitoring equipment, improved data analysis and clinical decision support tools supported by artificial intelligence have enabled patients to access healthcare services more directly and seamlessly.
Removing barriers, including physical barriers, is one of the biggest trends in the mental and overall health of this and next generations. This is an important role that technology will play in this emerging scenario.
Smoother access to emergency psychiatric care
The new era of health technology is not just about having Headspace Phone and telemedicine visits with your psychiatrist. It is also about how to solve life-threatening emergencies immediately without being slowed down by the saturated hospital system.
For many years, one of the most pressing emergency medical care issues has been to obtain the necessary evaluation and treatment for patients admitted to the hospital with an emergency mental illness (such as suicidal ideation or acute mental illness).Due to the shortage of psychiatric hospital beds, it usually takes two to three sky Before these patients are transferred to a mental hospital for final treatment.
However, by combining on-demand telemedicine calls with other critical services, hospitals can now provide emergency psychiatric assessment and treatment almost immediately. Patients can now be evaluated within hours instead of waiting days. Moreover, since nearly 70% of these patients do not require long-term inpatient care in a psychiatric hospital, we are now freeing up these beds for patients who need to be hospitalized. This is a technology that promotes “appropriate scale” care through a more patient-centric rather than system-centric approach.
Virtual care bypasses the barriers associated with hospitals and clinics, enabling patients to get care immediately. This technology is not applicable to all diseases and conditions, but with the emergence of new monitoring tools that can assess a wider range of patient symptoms, technology-driven care will improve care opportunities for more and more urgent health conditions.
Although telemedicine technology has existed for many years, leaders in this field need to be more proactive in bringing all stakeholders—from hospitals to insurance companies and medical technology companies—together and address the systems needed to implement the technology problem.
Home health tracking can improve and speed up care
On-site care monitoring technology has changed the lives of many people-from diabetes blood glucose monitors to pregnancy tests. Nevertheless, such technologies are still in their infancy. Cutting-edge personal tools have endless possibilities. They can not only save the lives of users, but also help our clinicians provide us with more accurate care.
Personal monitoring equipment allows monitoring over a period of time, rather than the single point-in-time monitoring of most hospitals and clinics. The combination of this type of monitoring and advanced data analysis, including population studies, will significantly improve our ability to accurately diagnose patients.
Mental health disorders are one of the most easily diagnosed and undertreated diseases. The explosive growth of new AI and ML supporting technologies is working hard to bridge this gap. For example, mental health self-management applications including diary and voice biomarker monitoring are helping to screen for depression, anxiety, and even Alzheimer’s in a non-invasive way. These innovative tracking technologies can alert individuals before they progress or deteriorate.In fact, it is Recently revealed Apple is also studying new technologies that use iPhone sensor data to detect depression and cognitive decline.
Given that the population is aging, about 80% of people over 65 have at least one chronic disease, and 80% of chronic disease patients have some degree of depression. It is obvious that health checks will reduce unnecessary suffering. Similarly, anxiety disorders are prevalent among young people today-it is estimated that one-third of young people now have some degree of anxiety. Early screening for these diseases will help many people who do not require advanced medical intervention but will still benefit from counseling, peer intervention or even app-based interventions that encourage mindfulness and relaxation.
Connecting health data will make care more accurate and accessible
With the digitization of our health information, we are expected to better share health data among healthcare providers. But the road to fulfilling this promise was slower than expected.
If all historical patient information is unified and seamlessly transmitted to any clinician, instead of relying on a single clinician to put all eggs in one basket, then all people can get care.
When we connect the data between clinics and hospitals, we also generate more complete and comprehensive health data from our home monitoring tools and wearable devices. This means that we can expect to see exponential growth in knowledge about how factors such as sleep habits affect our mental health, how nutritional intake affects disease, and clearer knowledge about the social factors that affect our health. Establishing these connections between patients, providers, and health technologies will allow for a huge shift from a provider and system-centric approach to a patient-centric approach.
We are beginning to see the integration of multiple health technologies-situational virtual care, personal monitoring equipment, clinician support tools, artificial intelligence and information transmission. With the emergence of more advanced technologies and businesses, we are steadily reducing the burden on overwhelmed healthcare providers and patients themselves, while enabling us to achieve unprecedented quality of care and early detection. As a doctor, I am very keen to support new innovations and have seen this generation open up a path to “medicine without walls”.
Photo Credit: Olga Strelnikova, Getty Images
