In the decade or so since the field of digital medicine began to take hold, the introduction of health-focused technologies has been practically nonstop — but several major obstacles must still be overcome before many of those innovations become widespread, according to Eric Topol, MD, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.
In an article published June 26 in the journal Science Translational Medicine, Dr. Topol described how the many potential benefits of digital medical devices and treatments are often precluded by initially unremarkable study results. "The expectation for immediate success using digital interventions did not take into account the warm-up phase required to amass experience, plan, execute and publish clinical trials," he wrote.
Additionally, many digital health solutions so far have been built around just one type of data, such as one type of image or only a patient's genomics. "This approach captures a very narrow, constrained view of a person and, in general, is grossly insufficient," Dr. Topol wrote. "Rather, multimodal data are needed to understand the uniqueness of human beings and to personalize medicine. This requires an aggregation of anatomical, physiological, biological, environmental, and demographic data."
Aside from these changes, according to Dr. Topol, it is also crucial that machine and deep learning artificial intelligence are incorporated into medicine. For example, he wrote, "digital medicine can incorporate natural language processing of voice during clinic visits to eliminate tedious keyboard use, or use machine vision in the hospital to improve patient safety by monitoring patients to prevent falls or to avoid removal of endotracheal tubes by patients in the intensive care unit."
And while these new innovations bring with them new challenges — algorithmic bias, data overloads, a lack of transparency, a need for increasingly rigorous clinical validation, privacy concerns — digital medicine continues to hold "considerable promise for improving the accuracy and efficiency of medical practice and for fostering a greater degree of empowerment for patients," Dr. Topol concluded.
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