Digital Health: What Is It Good for?
July 6, 2012 – 9:24 amPaul Sonnier, founder and Curator of the 12,000-member strong Digital Health group on LinkedIn has initiated a poll on digital health that is worthy of some attention.
Sonnier writes: “Since the overarching health benefits derived from the rapidly increasing utilisation of digital technologies . . . converging with health and healthcare are not quite at the point that Dr. Eric Topol describes as the ‘great inflection of medicine,’ it would be good to solicit the collective thoughts of the [Digital Health] group as to what the biggest health benefit is—or will be—as a result of the digital health super-convergence we are witnessing and driving.”
Sonnier has produced a single-question poll that asks members what they see as the biggest human health benefit derived from using digital health solutions. The choices are disease diagnosis, disease prediction (especially genomics), disease management and reduced radiation exposure.
Just as interesting as the poll results—at the time of writing, disease management (also my choice) is in the lead—are the comments. There is a lot of back-and-forth on the definition of digital health, which I found illuminating, and even a reference to an empirical study on the efficacy of various types of aluminium foil helmets as shields against invasive radio signals. That gave me a good chuckle to start my Friday morning.
Join the group and check out the poll at Digital Health on LinkedIn.
Norbert Sparrow
