It is well known that digital health technologies are being used to increase value and coordinate better care. And in 2019, this shows no signs of stopping with the ongoing digital transformation among healthcare startups. Digital health expert and Chief Data Scientist from HVH Precision Analytics, Oodaye Shukla, echoes this sentiment.
“This is directly related to the democratization of data, in terms of increased access to more types of healthcare data, and of AI algorithms,” Oodaye said. “This dual democratization has reduced or eliminated barriers in executing digital transformation strategies. There is also significant opportunity to extend these changes to healthcare outside the US. As an observation, you no longer have to have a PhD in data science to build and deploy highly effective solutions. To accelerate this transformation, organizations would benefit from the experience and lessons from other industries that have successfully (and profitably) integrated digital transformations into their business processes. For example, extracting actionable value and intelligence from data is at the core of a number of industries ranging from the e-commerce and oil and gas industries to the defense industry.”
[It is key to find secure ways to access and use data to improve human health, all while protecting individuals’ privacy. Read Oodaye’s take in Digital Medicine Report: Securing Against Cyber Threats.]
Care is changing as companies like HVH Precision Analytics are innovating by integrating and processing data across multiple healthcare and non-healthcare domains to produce actionable results to allow for faster patient diagnosis and recommending or prescribing the appropriate therapies.
“By applying advanced computational techniques, we shorten the path to diagnosis and develop actionable strategies for our clients,” he said. “We help our clients develop and deploy disruptive solutions into the marketplace, for example discovering undiagnosed patients by applying AI and machine learning algorithms to large healthcare databases and using that approach to provide our clients more precise ways to better target diagnosed patients.”
The future for leveraging data seems bright as Oodaye foresees that for at least the next five years the deployment of digital health solutions will continue to accelerate.
“The impact of digital health will be more pronounced and will permeate people's everyday activities,” he said. “The driving forces will be data democratization and cross-domain data integration; for example, integrating personally generated data (smart home and smart personal devices) with data collected by healthcare professionals and an individual consumer's purchasing patterns. These valuable and actionable insights will be extracted through the application of AI and machine learning algorithms and will drive significant changes in individual behavior and education about and delivery of healthcare.”
To learn more, join Oodaye at Digital Medicine & Medtech Showcase in San Francisco from Jan. 7—9. He will be speaking on the panel “Leveraging data, genomics, and informatics to transform clinical care.”
