Providence, R.I.-based Lifespan and Brown University teamed to launch a new digital health center that aims to streamline technology and eliminate health disparities for local and global communities.
"Digital health technologies, from wearables to apps, are increasingly used by consumers to serve health care needs," said Megan Ranney, MD, MPH, director of the new Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health. "However, the development and widespread use of these technologies is limited by a lack of efficacy data, lack of implementation guidance, and, most of all, by lack of systematic collaboration among researchers, clinicians, patients, and other stakeholders."
The center will serve as a research incubator and foster practical digital health tool development. It aims to train a new generation of digital health scientists and entrepreneurs as well with its experiential learning opportunities. The center's goal is to scale up digital treatment modalities to have a broad impact on patients and populations.
The Center for Digital Health will include entrepreneurs, academicians and clinicians. It builds on the health system's emergency digital health innovation program, which has developed and studied digital applications in emergency medicine for the past six years. Initiatives that have come out of the program include text messaging to reduce injury among adolescents and machine learning-based mobile applications to support adults with behavioral disorders.