Overview

Prof. Arriel Benis,  Head of Department

Digital Health is the confluence of healthcare, technology and design that focuses on the provision and consumption of healthcare. Digital Health is primarily concerned with making medicine more personal, continuous, accurate, accessible and data-driven, utilizing AI (Artificial Intelligence), smart mobile applications and ICT (Information Communication Technologies), supported by advanced wearable and sensor technologies to empower patients by providing them with highly-efficient and accessible health management tools.

Using these tools, healthcare professionals (e.g. physicians, nurses) together with the patients themselves can variously monitor, diagnose, treat and predict a broad range of health conditions.

Digital Health includes infrastructure technologies, medical devices, monitoring tools, analytical tools and Decision Support Systems (DSS) but also relies on design methodologies (e.g. Design Thinking, Service Design). These technologies and methodologies serve the healthcare professionals in providing care at the level of prevention, early detection, diagnosis, intervention/treatment and follow-up.

The global Digital Health market is experiencing substantial growth, and is expected to keep growing at a double-digit growth rate, reaching over $200 billion by 2024.

Despite the huge progress in healthcare technologies development, there are still barriers for the adoption of these solutions, such as:

• fragmentation of care (hospitals and community care)
• solutions that cannot be implemented within the workflows of healthcare systems
• gaps between the needs and the existing solutions
• lack of continuity of care and integrated care
• data issues - data heterogeneity & validity as well as data privacy & security 

In addition, there is a need to deliver comprehensive care that addresses clinical, behavioral, mental and social needs.

As the use of wearables and smart home unobtrusive technologies increases, the ability to monitor and analyze information from patients and their caregivers enables healthcare systems to provide personalized care. However, these new developments drive a change in healthcare delivery models as well as in the relationship between patients and healthcare professionals. These changes raise various challenges for the healthcare systems in implementing the new technologies in clinical practice.

The main challenge for the future will be empowering patients to become partners in the management of their health and diseases, enabling them to receive care whenever needed, wherever they are, without the need to arrive at the clinic/hospital.

For the older population, the challenge is to enable them live longer in their home environment, keeping their independence as well as reducing costs to public health and social care systems.

Patient-centered healthcare has become a new reality of contemporary life. The growth of big data has dramatically altered the healthcare landscape. It has demonstrated the urgent need to create a professional cadre of 21^st century physicians who will not only be excellent clinicians and better researchers, but also more knowledgeably capable of navigating the advanced technology of the digital world.

This need also extends to hospitals, HMOs, pharma & medical insurance companies and startups that will require highly trained personnel to serve as technology experts building bridges between the clinicians, program developers, algorithm designers and (data) scientists. It is the integration of these two worlds – medical sciences and information technology - which will set the bar for healthcare in the future, as well as for the 21st century physicians and healthcare analysts who will forge a new digital reality.

Changing the face of 21st century medicine is exactly what the HIT is doing. Developed two years prior to the outbreak of the Corona pandemic, enrollment for the unique (worldwide!) and innovative B.Sc. degree opened in the academic year of 2020/21. The innovative, one-of-a-kind, academic program in Digital Medical Technologies is training Israel’s next generation of future technologically-savvy doctors and clinical data analysts. The initiative was hailed by the Israeli Council for Higher Education as being “one of the most creative, original and best suited programs for the country’s needs”.