Creating communications excellence

The term ‘remote healthcare’ refers to the use of technology to connect patients with their healthcare team outside traditional clinical settings. Remote healthcare tools may include video or telephone consultations, remote monitoring devices, healthcare-related apps or wearable devices.

In whatever capacity, remote health technologies present many possible benefits for patient experiences and outcomes, either individually or as a broader population.  Apps and devices capture data that can support earlier, and possibly life-saving, interventions. Furthermore, they can also be empowering – supporting patients to take a more engaged and active role in their health-related decisions.

However, there are also possible challenges associated with such technologies and these challenges are likely to differ between therapy areas and from person to person. These challenges might be associated with cost, health or digital literacy levels of the user, access, language or translation needs, and in many cases they can also be behavioural.

By seeking to build a detailed understanding of the challenges in specific settings, we can more accurately recommend programmes, communications or targeted interventions to help overcome them, in turn supporting patients to embrace digital health tools that may be beneficial for their health outcomes.

Here at Inizio we conducted some exploratory research to understand this dynamic more fully. Using a targeted literature review, we looked at challenges patients might face around the use of digital remote health technologies, with a particular focus in two different conditions: diabetes and multiple sclerosis. These therapy areas were chosen as they represent two spaces with varying degrees of uptake of remote digital health solutions.

The research showed that even across two quite different conditions there are common challenges for people in relation to the use of digital health tools. For example, across both conditions we found a key issue was uncertainty around the role, value or benefits to be gained from using them.

This important issue can be navigated through effective, and importantly, insights-driven education. By working in partnership with the patient community, we can firstly build a deeper understanding of what the role, value or benefits should ‘look like’ from a patient perspective. This understanding can support developers to fine-tune solutions and enable us as communicators to co-create educational resources that communicate this messaging in an authentic and appropriate way.

Ben Johnson is Patient Engagement Consultant at MEDiSTRAVA, an Inizio Company