Proactive Care

Prevention, it is often said, is better than cure. In this new era, it makes sense that health services take advantage of new technologies, digital solutions and the power of data analysis to identify and target people who are at-risk of developing health related problems well in advance of them becoming problematic. Such technologies can be scaled to inform approaches to population health management and develop interventions that have wide scale impacts. Most would agree that disease prevention offers the greatest yield for population health and is amenable to a variety of digital health interventions via mobile and online applications, clinical kiosks and electronic patient portals. However, identifying return on investment and value for money can be large barriers to implementation, so good evidence is needed.