Digital Healthcare: Population-Level Applications

Digital technologies are now an essential part of daily life, and they have provided many solutions that were not possible before. According to the United Nations, the world population is now three times greater than in the mid-twentieth century. Equally public health demands have increased with different concerns and priorities at different points in time, for example, the use of vaccines to control major life-threatening diseases such smallpox and polio to molecular diagnostics for targeted therapies in cancers. Despite these advances, enabling access to these services remains very challenging. The emergence of digital technologies has made these services more accessible than before but has also introduced new complications to the system such as increasing demands on the operations of the system. In this chapter, we will discuss the latest developments in digital healthcare applications to ease population-wide public health challenges.