Imagine if you had a heart attack.

Fortunately, you survived because of good quality treatment of the nurses and doctors at the hospital and you are now preparing to go home to get treatment from the people closest to you.

Doctors have explained that your health condition is bad. You have to choose: change your lifestyle or die. You have to stop smoking, increase your physical activity, eat healthy foods with a balanced diet (while reducing your salt), and make sure you take all the drugs according to their instructions.

But before you leave the hospital, your nurse notifies several applications that you can download on a smartphone that will help you recover. The assistance includes facilitating the transition from hospital to home and all related behavioral changes that are needed to reduce the risk of subsequent heart attacks.

Advances in digital technology have led to rapid changes in the field of health care. Many of the benefits from the use of the technology, but the development of the technology itself is difficult to pursue. This creates new challenges for the health care professional and the patient.

What is digital therapy?

Digital therapy can be defined as any form of intervention that is delivered digitally and provides therapeutic effects on patients. This can be used to treat medical conditions in a manner similar to taking medication or surgery.

An example of the latest digital therapy including different types of applications that help us administer medications and monitor your heart health, there are also applications to support the mental health and fitness or any augmented virtual reality for & educate patients.

Health records, prescription tables and sheets of health education in the form of paper are outdated. We can now send letters electronically, enter information into electronic data storage and access medical data digitally.

And health education for patients is no longer done in static and one-way communication. The digital revolution gives facilities to obtain the dynamic and personal education and two-way interaction between the patient and the therapist.

How can digital therapy help digital?

Digital health services improve the quality of care as a whole, even in situations where patients live hundreds of kilometers away from their doctors.

For example, diabetic patients. This condition is experienced by 1.7 million people in Australia. This is one of the main factors causing heart disease and stroke. So it's important for diabetic patients to control health conditions to reduce their risk of having a heart attack or stroke.

Recent research measuring the team-based online games, through application to provide educational content for diabetic patients. The person who receives the application in this experiment is having a significant and sustainable improvement, as measured through their HbA1c (blood glucose levels).

Application-based games of this kind will improve treatment in patients with chronic diseases in large scale.

A new electronic device is also used by all ages for tracking activity, measure the hours of sleep, and noting the intake of nutrients. This information gives feedback quickly and accurately to the individual and their therapists, allows adjustments if necessary. The information note also can be combined into larger datasets to uncover patterns from time to time and give information to treatment in the future.

Digital therapy gave rise to a new term in the health services industry. "Connected Health" reflects the more physicians and patients can mutual interaction. Some examples include text messaging, telehealth, and video consultations with experts of the health professional.

More and more evidence suggests that treatment provided digitally (including applications and text message-based intervention) can impact both for your health and can help you deal with chronic diseases, such as diabetes and diseases cardiovascular.

But not all the same health applications

While the digital health revolution is an interesting thing, research results must be interpreted cautiously by patients and health care providers.

Innovation has created 325,000 health mobile applications in 2017. This has caused regulatory problems related to patient safety (including data protection) when using digital therapy.

A recent study identified that most research has a relatively short duration of the intervention and only reflect short-term effects with participants. Long-term effects of therapeutic interventions of digital technology are still largely unknown.

With the speed of technological development, today means the applicable security mechanism will now face a challenge in terms of ethics and new regulations. Who prescribes? Who is responsible for storage, and the accuracy of the data? How technology is integrated into the existing care system?

Digital health requires a collaborative approach

Digital health service now presents a seismic disturbance toward patient service, particularly when new technology is cheap and easy to access by patients who may not have the insight required to understand their condition indeed. Technology can assist and empower patients to take care of himself, but there is still much to be done to link this new technology into the existing health care system now.

For example, the latest Apple Watch functions where we could see our heart rate related data. Research like Apple Heart Studymenunjukkan this exciting innovation that can significantly improve the detection rate of heart rhythm disturbances, and increased stroke prevention efforts.

But when a patient receives a notice that the heart rate high, what should they do? do ignore it? Go to a general practitioner? Directly to emergency units? And, does this affect our health system?

Many of these questions remain unanswered can not so urgent the need for continued research to learn how technology can be applied to the existing health care system.

If we are going to produce digital therapy tools that are useful for health problems, then it is very important for the users involved in the process. Patients and health care professionals can work together in the development of software for designing applications that meet the needs of the patient's health care.

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