Overview
Digital Health involves the use of information and communication technologies to help address the health problems and challenges faced by patients. Technologies include both hardware and software solutions and services, including wearable devices, mobile phones and applications, telemedicine and clinic and remote monitoring sensors.
Digital health technologies and services are significant contributors to the transformation of health care delivery. The overall efficiency and sustainability of healthcare in Australia will continue to drive healthcare policy and reform measures. There are developments which will shape the future of healthcare and policy settings, thereby impacting on the operating environment of the medical device sector in digital health.
Some of the most significant include:
- My Health Record has the potential to provide a variety of benefits to individuals, healthcare providers, the health system, and the economy as a whole. The roll-out of MyHealth Record and the capacity for the data collected to be used to improve health outcomes through a range of measures including informing areas of potential research and monitoring real-world device performance.
MTAA has also been a strong advocate for the secondary use of MyHealth Record data to be permitted by Government, providing strong data security and privacy is maintained as it is of the view that there are significant opportunities for improved health outcomes to be gained from allowing secondary use of the data. See MTAA’s submission.
- Increased digitalisation of healthcare leading to different ways of delivering healthcare and the regulatory and reimbursement challenges this will pose including issues around cyber security. See more on Cybersecurity
- Increased personalisation of healthcare treatments and growing use of artificial intelligence and robotics and the regulatory and reimbursement challenges this will pose.
