Today's healthcare is changing. It is a fact that we do not have all the money needed to treat everyone who will need healthcare services in the future and it is not smart either.
Today's health service has a major focus on treating patients. In itself very positive, but also a good opportunity for the patient to waive responsibility for getting well on their own.
The health service of the future will move away from patients being treated in a hospital to patients treating themselves at home. Training and rehabilitation become the most important tool for creating health-building behaviour. Many symptoms and diagnoses have their origin in health-damaging behaviour. The challenge will be to create a behavioral change to health-building behaviour.
In order to be able to create a behavioral change, a foundation must be built for it in the patient or the person in need of help. It includes:
understanding of their own situation
knowledge of what is correct training and rehabilitation
implementation of training and rehabilitation
eventually internalizing this health-building behaviour
In such a picture, it is also important to be able to involve relatives and other volunteers in order to build motivation and encouragement for the patient's training and rehabilitation.
To achieve this, new and innovative digital solutions are required.
The digital solutions must be aimed at the entire value chain for the delivery of healthcare services. This includes the specialists, healthcare personnel, the patient, relatives and other volunteers.
The specialists must be able to describe best practice related to training and rehabilitation. It must be done in an educational way and distributed in a digital form to healthcare personnel, patients and relatives.
It is also the case that training and rehabilitation require adaptation to the patient's profile, diagnosis, condition and life situation. It requires that the health personnel who will guide the patient can collect data about the patient, carry out screening and adapt the correct digital training program to the patient. Guidance and follow-up must preferably also take place digitally with the help of video or asynchronous message exchange. The use of near-body sensor technology opens up even better quality in the follow-up in the form of digital support to uncover abnormalities.
For some types of groups, the use of various gamification mechanisms also becomes important to create extra motivation. For others in need of help, there may be a strong personal drive to complete the training program or motivated by the immediate family, next of kin or volunteers.
For the patient and their relatives, it will create security about how training exercises in everyday life should be carried out and security about what is best practice towards creating a better life situation.
As you gain experience with the exercises, this can be finely tuned to what is most effective for different personal profiles in different life situations. Here, artificial intelligence can be a good tool for tailoring an individual training plan over time. Researchers will also gain access to a lot of user data that provides a basis for developing even better exercises.
In this picture that is now opening up, a new type of digital support will be required. Over the course of 3 years, Youwell has developed such a tool together with Helse Bergen. We are starting to gain some experience with this and see that there is a growing need to develop expertise in creating good digital content for training, treatment and rehabilitation in a home situation.
The healthcare service of the future will increasingly be delivered at the home of the person in need of help, and the person in need of help will have to take greater responsibility for improving their own health. We see that technology will support this, but a lot of work is required to develop good digital content. Preferably with good documentation of all the success stories where people have improved through training, rehabilitation and treatment.
Comments