"Digital health" is a difficult term to define. Many aspects of modern life went digital years ago and we have since stopped referring to their digital aspects. This will probably soon be true for healthcare too. An e-prescription will simply be a prescription; a telemedicine consult will be a plain-old consultation with your doctor; and "digital radiology" will stop making sense as the last physical radiograph is dipped in developer fluid and hung up to dry. As we make this transition, though, it is still important to differentiate between digital and non-digital tools used in healthcare, particularly when concerned with how human users interact with them.
This book defines digital health technologies (DHTs) as "information technology systems and applications used in the healthcare domain". This includes systems used by healthcare providers in hospitals and clinics, but also applications used by patients or individual clinicians on their own smartphones and devices. These systems and applications are now commonly described - in government regulation in particular - as "Digital Health Technologies".
So, at its simplest, digital health refers to digital versions of the paper-based information systems that have been in place in hospitals, clinics and patients' homes for many years. Outside the hospital walls are a wide range of consumer smartphone apps (often linked to self-monitoring devices), government digital services, new AI-driven diagnostic systems, and research databases that all fall under the label of DHT and are of interest to this book.
The umbrella also spans the older terms eHealth and mHealth, as well as connected sensors, wearables, and applied artificial intelligence in clinical and public-health settings.
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