Patient Engagement

The bilingual Daman Health Bot is an AI-powered tool designed to help users conduct a self-assessment on COVID-19 symptoms, directing them towards the appropriate level of care or action required. 

Global health leaders are calling for urgent action to help combat climate change and reduce inequality to improve health around the world during the closing keynote of the HIMSS & Heath 2.0 European Digital event.

According to the plaintiff's lawyer, HealthAlliance Hospital's Broadway campus directed her to the vendor when she asked for electronic copies of his patient records.

Technology’s being harnessed to help patients with chronic conditions get back on track with treatment during the pandemic. The HIMSS Digital Dialogue webinar, in collaboration with Philips, explored how digital solutions offered new routes to treatment.

Managing the whole population during a global pandemic is challenging, so we need to share our learning, says Päivi Sillanaukee, ambassador for Health and Wellbeing of Finland and director-general of the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health.

With the explosion of social media networks in the past decade, gamification has become a powerful tool used to drive user engagement. When looking at healthcare apps, children have significantly benefitted from the fun and speedy elements injected into educational apps and games that might have previously lacked the immediacy and engagement needed. In the meantime, researchers and experts have worked on refining engagement design and enabling users to overcome negative associations they have with completing mundane health-related tasks. The panel discussion, Kids 2.0: Engagement and Behavior Change, at the HIMSS & Health 2.0 European Digital Conference explored the making of award-winning games and the research and testing processes involved.  The panel consisted of moderator, Anna Sort, founder and CEO of PlayBenefit Spain, and speakers; Pamela Kato, owner of P.M. Kato Consulting US, Dom Raban, co-founder and CEO of Xploro, Saran Muthiah founder of Enrich My Care UK, Sveatoslav Vizitiu co-founder and CEO of Wello Romania. During the webinar discussion, the panellists discussed the most important factors to ensure measurable impact and intended outcomes when creating a game and improving treatment adherence. Pamela Kato said: “The most important thing to do before you start designing and developing your technology is to do your homework. And it's kind of boring. It's not as exciting as thinking, am I going to do a shooter game or simulation? “You need to figure out what problem you're going to target and look in the research literature and make sure that it's a big enough problem that you can impact and measure in a trial, and that there's a need for it. “I've seen so many situations where games didn’t work out. They didn't have the problem. So there wasn't really a lot of room for your game to make a difference.” Dom Raban, co-founder and CEO Xploro spoke about his experience of developing Xploro, a clinically validated digital therapy which uses augmented reality, artificial intelligence and games to deliver health information to young patients in a way which makes them feel empowered, engaged and informed whilst having fun. “About two years ago, we set up what we call our expert advisory board. And our expert advisory board is a group of children. Involving children has been absolutely central to our approach over the last five years,” explains Raban. “They're an amazing group, there's six of them and they have been through treatment for very serious illnesses. The other six have never been anywhere near a hospital. So they give us the full range of opinions. They always have access to the latest version of Xploro and they're always on hand to tell us what's working, what isn't working and come up with ideas for new features,” added Raban.  Creating a user-centred design Kato also shared the lessons learned working with user-centred designs for children: “One of the really important lessons is to just remember it’s hard for them to express things verbally. “What I try to do as much as possible is really try to use visuals when I talk to them, and to reduce the demands on them to have to explain things to me, but to show me by pointing at pictures of what they like. “You’ll also have the parents around and you can ask them what's going on as well. When you're interviewing and making technologies for young kids, you also have to know how to interview adults because they're also part of the solution inevitably.” Tackling the challenge of existing processes Saran Muthiah, founder of Enrich My Care UK, a digital platform that helps to manage the health and care needs of children with disabilities, spoke about the challenge of existing processes and getting through red tapes and organisational policies and barriers faced in the industry. “What we thought is how can we start mirroring what is the current practice, however, bring value through that. We have provided as an option that healthcare professionals do not necessarily need to be registered and become part of the platform, they can simply get through some validation, security, validation, and upload records immediately,” said Muthiah. “This also helps with automatically digitising the paper records, which is the agenda centrally both in the UK as well as in other parts of Europe. We feel that this is a good starting point. When they see the value, then we are able to get through those values and they want to be a stakeholder and want to subscribe to the platform and have better engagement with the patient.” Register now to attend the HIMSS & Health 2.0 European Digital Conference and keep up with the latest news and deveopments from the event here.

Theo Sergiou, a patient speaker and activist, says that although progress has been made in terms of empowering patients at an organizational level, there is room for improvement at an institutional level.

The extent to which the world of digital health has changed during the COVID-19 pandemic has been widely recognised. Remote medicine has become part of the new normal for patients and clinicians, introducing innovative care delivery models that are likely to endure even if the pendulum swings back to some degree in a post-COVID age. With this change has come a fresh focus on the role of smartphones to measure disease progression, rather than just a means of raising alerts and triggers that require immediate clinical intervention. This growing emphasis on evaluating how a condition affects the individual, and how well that patient is performing or functioning over time, has led to great interest in how remote assessment can enable new evidence-based approaches to treating and managing disease. New measures Tools such as FLOODLIGHT MS, a smartphone-based digital assessment suite for multiple sclerosis (MS) in development by Roche and Genentech, are attracting attention for the way they can deliver novel measures to help detect if, and how, the different functional domains and symptoms of a disease are evolving. “From what we see, I think the medical community is ready for these types of approaches,” says Mike Baker, PHC product leader at Roche. “Developers of this kind of tool need to be able to provide evidence that shows that they work and give the medical community some confidence to move forwards.” Baker says that for assessment tools like FLOODLIGHT MS to be successful, they have to generate actionable data. FLOODLIGHT MS focuses on generating data from active and passive tests to measure functional status in key domains typically impacted by MS, providing insights to clinicians and people with the disease to help them to manage the condition. The value of rapid diagnosis and proactive management of the disease was emphasised in a 2016 paper, Brain health: time matters in multiple sclerosis. By complementing standardised care models, digital assessment tools can enhance the treatment and management of MS on a continuous basis. Time shift “What we hope is that FLOODLIGHT MS impacts clinical practice in a positive way,” says Baker. “That it empowers people with MS to have better conversations and brings them closer to their care team. It’s not about replacing anything – the six-monthly visits or the interactions they already have. Rather, we hope it can help people make the most of that limited amount of time.” Baker suggests that people who have MS hold the key to understanding their own data. “If you’re seeing changes in the data, what does that really mean? Only the person with the disease can tell you what it means to them, and that element of context is crucial,” he says. This is a major reason why Roche and Genentech are working towards a tool which focuses on underlying disease worsening rather than alerts and triggers. With changes in data being so dependent on context, it can be difficult to derive the severity of a condition solely through information gathered via smartphone. In any case, a patient suffering a rapid worsening of symptoms will probably already have a care team around them. “We want to look at the underlying concept of progression,” says Baker. “The fact that MS progresses independent of relapse makes it important to identify and manage the condition continuously in an appropriate way. We’re trying to offer something that the care team can’t do today – monitoring the steady decline rather than the more obvious acute activity.” Engagement and collaboration with existing health systems As far as the adoption of smartphone-based assessment and monitoring goes, the critical aspects are: engagement among patients and clinicians, industry collaboration and embedding digital tools into existing care pathways. Baker says co-creation of solutions is as important as the science of assessment. “It’s certainly important that you can measure MS, but equally as important is that people with MS are willing to use the tools to generate data, share the data and do it on an ongoing basis,” he says. “It’s    something that takes a lot of thought and close partnership with the community.” Post-COVID, Baker expects the appetite for digital assessment tools in neuroscience and medicine to continue its rapid growth. “COVID changed everything in terms of access to care,” he says. “Many people with MS don’t want to go to higher risk places such as hospitals unnecessarily. It’s changed the way care is delivered, and I think we’ll see much more access to remote medicine in the future.” But one developer cannot deliver change on their own. It requires industry-wide collaboration among the medical and pharma community, leading to a standardised approach to digital monitoring. “If we have better mechanisms to detect changes in people with MS, it improves our ability to develop medicines,” explains Baker. “We can see those changes sooner and in more detail, and that means we can be faster and more efficient in the way we run clinical trials. It’s all about the understanding of MS - and that translates into better care for the patient.” To learn more, visit the Roche booth at the HIMSS & Health 2.0 European Digital Conference (7-11 September). Click here for further information and to get your ticket. Keep up with the latest news and deveopments from the event here.

Leading stakeholders have called for a strategic re-orientation towards value-based care to improve clinical outcomes. This paradigm shift would entail moving from volume to value-based payments.

Julian Flannery leads Summus, which offers remote second-opinion services for patients and employers. He says the pandemic has led to a "real acceleration of adoption" for virtual care.