Many mindsets changed with the 2020 pandemic, and this has been accompanied by digital health plans and strategies at all levels, with European funding to finance them, enabling multiple projects to be launched in this area. Regulations such as the recently approved European Union Regulation on the European Health Data Space lead us to believe that this will not be a passing fad.
The new digital health
But we may ask ourselves: are we doing it right? What is the digital health we are building like? Is it more humane, accessible and sustainable? Several decades of experience have already taught us that there are many ways to get digital transformation wrong… and some ways to get it right. We cannot use digital transformation as a mere tool to cut costs or to put patients behind a technological screen and isolate them from healthcare professionals. That would only generate rejection from the general public. Similarly, we have to accept that there will always be a percentage of the population that is technophobic, however small. And we must continue to provide them with services that are accessible to their preferences.
Digital health must be more technological, of course, but it must also be more human. Today, even more than before, we need to think about the digital transformation of healthcare in terms of creating a new generation of accessible, digitally native services that appropriately combine the digital with the face-to-face, the technological with the human, to provide a seamless and simple end-to-end patient experience that is both useful and accessible. It is about breaking down barriers and bringing the healthcare system closer to the patient, not isolating them. Perhaps that is where the magic of digital transformation lies.
