What are Digital Therapeutics and How Can They Improve Patient Outcomes?

Learn how enhancing already established treatments with telehealth and digital therapeutics improve patient outcomes across the board.

Digital therapeutics isn’t so much a “brand new technology” as it is a combining of existing technology, telehealth strategies, and digital accessibility with cutting-edge software to improve patient outcomes.

So, how can a healthcare facility use the latest medical computers, advanced patient portals, and medical databases to deploy these strategies to help patients regardless of location and income?

How Are Digital Therapeutics Implemented?

Digital therapeutics benefit from connected monitoring devices of every stripe.

Wearable heart rate trackers can aid anyone suffering from heart disease, heart irregularity, or any other circulatory condition. Connected blood-testing machines can provide a host of detailed information, all transferred right to the doctor’s EMR computer for observation. There are even plans for devices like contact lenses that can detect patient glucose levels!

These devices are paired with wellness apps that pair with devices like patient mobile phones and doctor medical tablets and collect all the data from the patient’s connected device to create notifications, use histories, live data feeds, recommendations, and more.

What Conditions Benefit from Digital Therapeutics?

One primary use of digital therapeutics is technological reinforcement of cognitive behavior therapy. Connected wearables and mobile wellness apps, backed by doctor monitoring, can improve many conditions.

For disorders like ADHD, traditional cognitive behavioral therapy and sensory-stimulating VR can be used as a persistent treatment. The FDA even approved a digital therapy device in the form of a patch worn by a patient while they sleep. This patch sends pulses of low-level electricity into the brain and has been proven to help with executive functioning and behavioral adaptation just as well as traditional ADHD drugs.

Even obesity can be fought with digital therapeutics by combining exercise and diet trackers, medication tracking, and the personal accountability of a doctor, nurse, or dietitian monitoring every interaction and gently reminding patients when to course-correct behavior.

Physical therapy can also be done at home with the right digital therapeutic techniques. Devices like connected step counters can be piped into an app that walks the patient through their daily physical therapy routine. The tracker helps the patient with their form and assures accountability — the remote physical therapist can then assess patient progress over time and aid them with new exercises or techniques.

Why Embrace Digital Therapeutics?

If digital therapeutics are just an extension of other treatments and cognitive-behavioral therapies, why are they necessary?

Unfortunately, rural hospitals are closing in record numbers, and the one-two punch of clinician shortages and health-insurance gaps means not everyone can take advantage of the latest medical tech.

So, instead of driving forty miles to the nearest healthcare provider, patients can instead save those trips for truly serious health events. Long-term health management for chronic and recurring conditions can be successfully managed anywhere through wifi.

When you also consider the elderly, disabled patients, or patients with poor transportation situations, the benefits of digital therapy become clear.

Bring Digital Therapeutic Technology to Your Organization

A successful digital therapy strategy needs a strong network and secure computers and medical tablets for doctor’s, as well as training and clear policy decisions for the staff.

If you’re unsure where to start reach out to an expert at Cybernet today to have your questions answered.