JAMA Viewpoint: Digital Health for Cardiovascular Medicine

As healthcare providers embrace the digital age, how can digital health applications be used improve health and health care delivery for patients with cardiovascular disease? Mintu P. Turakhia, MD, MAS, assistant professor (cardiovascular medicine); Sumbul A. Desai, MD, clinical assistant professor (general medical disciplines); and Robert A. Harrington, MD, professor (medicine) answer this question in a new opinion piece published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

“The framework of health care delivery has fundamentally changed over the last 8 years with reforms, including the Affordable Care Act, incentivizing the quality and efficiency of care,” write Turakhia, Desai and Harrington. “Cardiovascular care has been at the center of this transformation, with the earliest readmission payment penalties and cost bundling focused on myocardial infarction, heart failure, and revascularization.” These changes to the health care landscape, as well as the adoption of the electronic health record and reimbursement for chronic care management that is not face-to-face care present tremendous opportunities for digital cardiovascular care.

These opportunities do not come absent challenges. In The Outlook of Digital Health for Cardiovascular Medicine, the authors report that “a central challenge in digital health is to present data that are actionable for clinicians, patients, and caregivers,” among others outlined in the article.

However, digital health and cardiovascular disease management are a natural fit, due to not “ just the high disease prevalence and societal costs, but to the ability of technologies to measure relevant biological signals continuously or near continuously, including heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, heart rhythm, and physical activity.”