New Year, new trends

When we talk about current trends in healthcare, it’s impossible not to mention AI 🙂 Of course, the use of chatbots for diagnosis, patient-physician interactions and other services comes to mind first, but what other digital interventions are there, and what are they used for?

We checked the ClinicalTrials database for active interventional studies assessing the effect of digital interventions (including devices, behaviour advice and tracking apps, educational digital programmes and websites, etc.).

It turns out that there is a very wide range of digital interventions applied to a wide range of conditions: from general advice on healthy lifestyle to focused programmes aimed at rehabilitation of patients after cancer, heart failure or COVID-19 infection.

These studies don’t have any results yet, but we know from other studies that digital interventions can be very effective in tackling global health literacy and general health (see for example Heerman WJ et al. JAMA 2024;332(24):2068-2080. doi:10.1001/jama.2024.22362). With increasing global access to smartphones and the evolution of AI, digital interventions are set to make a major impact on healthcare as we know it.