How Digital Companions, Therapeutics Are Changing Healthcare

September 29, 2022 - Thanks to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the medical industry has been hurled into a digital healthcare environment to support and provide care to patients while social distancing, leading to improved access and patient care. Digital health technologies — such as mobile health (mHealth), telehealth or telemedicine, connected devices, wearables, sensors, health information technology (HIT), personalized medicine, and digital therapeutics — are giving medical providers and researchers a more holistic view of patient health using real-time data. More importantly, patients now have greater choices regarding their approach to healthcare treatment.

According to Glooko Chief Medical Officer Mark Clements, MD, PhD, CPI FAAP, who uses these digital products daily as a practicing pediatric endocrinologist and clinical researcher, “In the diabetes world, clinicians use a variety of tools that assist us with population health management — the biggest one, of course, being the electronic medical record.”

“Additionally, patient portals allow physicians to communicate back and forth with patients. More recently, telehealth solutions have emerged to allow physicians to deliver care remotely. Coupled with continuous monitoring technology, clinicians caring for individuals with diabetes can be enabled to view glucose metrics or glucose outcomes and insulin delivery at a population level,” Clements explained. “The challenge with new innovations is that it is incredibly difficult to develop a new habit as a human being, particularly as an adult.”

However, when utilizing the science behind how to develop new habits, digital companions and therapeutics can help people more easily incorporate healthier habits into their everyday lives.

Digital tools that assist with behavior change and provide adaptive interventions are also emerging, with the goal of driving precision patient engagement. However, as with all innovations, there are challenges with these digital therapeutics, especially when integrating them into clinical care.

“As digital tools and software as a medical device (SaMD) proliferate, physicians end up with situations where patients are using multiple systems and may have to close one app and open another to accomplish all the needed tasks,” Clements observed. “Because clinicians interact with data, not from one individual, but hundreds or thousands of individuals, they are finding that there's an overwhelming proliferation of workflows and that the cognitive burden of repeated context switching throughout the day becomes significant. ”

In Clement's early years, he recalls when patients would bring in various devices that required numerous computer cables. Meanwhile, physicians would occasionally be hamstrung by hospital network security policies, which would intermittently prevent the upload of device data and delay patient care.

“When a patient is asked to upload device data from home, they now have the burdensome experience of having to sit down, log into a computer, and find a cable that they have maybe never even used before — all of which is a complicated and frustrating process,” he noted.

Luckily, software companies have learned to leverage data interoperability and new digital solutions to create easy-to-use therapeutic devices for chronic disease management, positioning digital products as the glue that bonds and strengthens the therapeutic alliance between providers and patients.

The Difference between Digital Therapeutics and Digital Companions

While digital solutions can help the healthcare industry achieve key objectives in identifying, monitoring, and motivating patients through natural disease progression and offering guidance during disease management, some of the most touted benefits of digital therapeutics include the promotion of medication adherence and delivery of the correct dosage at the proper time.

“A digital therapeutic is one that specifically assists with dosing decisions with a medication, or specifically with decision points related to taking or not taking the medication. These carry a higher regulatory burden than digital companions,” Clements said.

“A digital companion, on the other hand, may help somebody achieve their health goals in alliance with a drug or other therapeutic,” he continued. “As an example, medications that have been shown to promote weight loss would probably benefit from a digital companion that promotes physical activity and healthy eating. These are not necessarily providing a decision related to the medication or its dosing, but are activating the individual to achieve their health goal in conjunction with the medication.”

While digital therapeutics and companions have significant value on their own, combining the two offers the right boost to improving patient outcomes by allowing a higher proportion of the population prescribed a specific drug or device the opportunity to receive the coordinating benefit.

Additionally, digital health solutions are rapidly fostering the development of personalized healthcare, or precision medicine, by providing individual patients with the most effective healthcare faster and at a lower overall cost.

Clements highlights that precision medicine hinges on growing a deeper understanding of the human body and overcoming the limitations of technology, which are beginning to be removed with the advancements in big data computing and storage. Educating healthcare consumers about its value is essential for advancing patient empowerment and individualized care.

Integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Using rules-based algorithms and machine learning techniques, digital health tools can easily find the right engagement, for the right person, at the right moment.

“I am most excited about the potential for AI models to predict individuals who will be more or less successful on a particular therapy, which therapy a particular patient will be most successful on when given multiple choices, and which people will most likely have a side effect or an adverse effect from a medication,” Clements emphasized.

Additionally, AI applications may reinforce healthy habits with just-in-time adaptive interventions that use machine learning to identify the optimal context in which to deliver a behavioral nudge and the optimal content of the message that delivers the nudge.

For instance, digital data can be used to form an entire library of potential moments throughout the day when a nudge can be sent and a whole library of possible messages that vary in their underlying psychological theories and behavioral nudging strategies to determine the most effective approach for that individual.

The accelerated digital transformation in healthcare has drastically altered how treatments are delivered, creating greater access to personalized medical care. While digital health technologies, such as digital therapeutics and companions with AI, can empower patients to take a more active role in their chronic disease management regimen, these digital solutions are also able to give clinicians more detailed and continuous monitoring data to help them deliver care more effectively and improve outcomes.

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About Glooko

Glooko improves health outcomes of people with chronic conditions through its personalized, intelligent, connected care platform. Our proven technologies make lives better by revolutionizing the connection between patients and providers, driving patient engagement and adherence via digital therapeutics, and accelerating the speed of clinical trials.