Share

The value of digital technology in addressing quality care

accreditation
Share your Subscriber Article
You have 5 articles to share every month. Send this story to a friend!
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
loading...
Loading, please wait...

The more doctors know, the more they are likely to be able to diagnose a problem, establish its cause and offer – hopefully some immediate relief as well as long-term lifestyle advice to the patient to promote long-term health. Doctors, of course, are adept at translating the verbal complaints and descriptions of an ailment into sensible diagnosis. Modern healthcare consumers are increasingly more demanding and informed about their expectations and needs. Millennials are all googling their symptoms, and gathering an understanding of their conditions from the web. The explosion of technology into the healthcare industry and the readily available wealth of online healthcare information is augmenting the patient’s descriptions of their symptoms, making it safer, quicker, more reliable and cheaper to get accurate diagnoses. Of course at times, this unsanctioned information can also lead to confusion and anxiety.

Various technologies can provide a wealth of data and insight for doctors and medical aids alike. Wearable and more recently ingestible devices can offer streaming data from patients and collectively provide an enormous amount of data for broader learnings that will help us understand our health in ways we cannot yet even imagine.

Discovery Health’s HealthID platform, which has been running for four years now, allows patients to consent to share a detailed history of their health - including test results from the past – in order to support their doctors with each diagnosis and establish treatment plans.  More than 4000 doctors in South Africa are using Discovery HealthID, and more than 1.2 million Discovery Health Medical Scheme members have consented to allow doctors to access their health history.

Read this for free
South Africans need to be in the know if we want to create a prosperous future. News24 has kept the country informed for 25 years, and we're about to enter a new chapter of fearless journalism. Join our free subscription trial to unlock this story and a world of news aimed to inform, empower, and inspire.
Try our free 14-day trial
Already a subscriber? Sign in
heading
description
username
Show Comments ()
Editorial feedback and complaints

Contact the public editor with feedback for our journalists, complaints, queries or suggestions about articles on News24.

LEARN MORE