Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Apr 22, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Apr 22, 2022 - May 6, 2022
Date Accepted: Sep 13, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
COVID-19’s impact on digital health adoption: The growing gap between a technological and a cultural transformation
ABSTRACT
Background:
In the 21st century, healthcare has started going through major changes. Due to the rising number of patients with chronic conditions; an increased access to new technologies, medical information and peer support via the Internet; and the ivory tower of medicine breaking down, a cultural transformation called digital health has begun.
Objective:
To analyze COVID-19's impact on the cultural and technological adoption of digital health.
Methods:
Opinion piece
Results:
It seems that technologies become available at an unprecedented rate, and the cultural transformation is the component that will take time. Learning to deal with the equal-level partnership takes more time than learning to use a sensor or smartwatch, Still, if the technological and cultural transformations can take place almost simultaneously, there is a big chance that the core elements of care such as empathy, compassion and relationships based on trust will remain intact. However, clinical reality does not reflect this optimism. Healthcare is overwhelmed worldwide, physicians rapidly burn-out under the immense pressure, patients with chronic conditions lack access to care, treatments get delayed and medical professionals do their best to maintain the system.
Conclusions:
Nevertheless, if we do it well enough now, we can spare a decade of technological transformations and bring that long-term vision of patients becoming the point-of-care to the practical reality of today. This is a historic opportunity we might not want to waste.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.