DIGITAL HEALTH IN MALAYSIA

The aims of adopting digital health in Malaysia are diverse and complicated. From preventing disease, helping patients monitor and manage chronic conditions, lowering the cost of healthcare provision, and making medicine more tailored to individual needs.
Those aims could potentially benefit patients and their healthcare providers. By generating data on health markers, from activity level to blood pressure, it’s hoped that digital health will allow Malaysians to improve their lifestyles and maintain good health, and few visits to their physician.
Digital health is a mechanism that assists in diagnosing new illnesses or worsening existing ones. By enabling healthcare providers s to step in earlier during a disease, digital health tools could help shorten the length of an illness or help ease symptoms before they take hold. Not only could digital health help improve quality of life, but it could also reduce the overall cost of a person’s healthcare over their lifetime, trimming bills for providers and patients alike. 

Digital health is not just ‘lifestyle medicine, is an ecosystem that will increasingly offer ways for people with chronic conditions to better monitor and manage them.
While digital health can give users the tools to practice lifestyle medicine with just a smartphone and an app, adding in a peripheral or two could improve the medical management of their disease.
Take those with diabetes: connected glucose monitors can help diabetics get a handle on their diet and how effective their medication is by tracking their blood sugar control over time. Digital health tools mean more and better data on such metrics can be collected and shared with physicians to allow them to analyze the results, and adjust their management accordingly.

While it would be reassuring to imagine such systems were designed for the altruistic purpose of keeping people healthier for longer, the ultimate aim of using digital health to manage chronic conditions is to cut providers’ costs by reducing the number of doctor’s appointments, emergency room visits and even hospital admissions that people with such illnesses need.
The digital health market is also likely to see the blending of what might typically have been considered ‘consumer’ and ‘medical-grade’ digital health tech, driven by companies from both sides of the divide.

One of the less known benefits of greater use of digital health tools is the potential insights that building up a vast repository of data on health markers of people around the world could create.
In the coming years, with big data systems and artificial intelligence, researchers may be able to track the conditions and people’s lifestyles.

Imposing how doing or not doing a particular thing (be it where you live, what you eat, where you work, what medications you take, and so on) will impact your chances of having a specific medical condition.
While there are obvious and sensible privacy concerns over how sensitive health data is utilised, if handled appropriately, data gathered by digital health apps could potentially prove a treasure trove for scientists trying to improve public health. 

It’s also worth commemorating that for all the buzz about new digital technologies, healthcare industries are still struggling to get up to date and stop using fax machines without having time to start thinking about a future filled with wearables and more.