Scale-up of Digital Innovations in Health Care: Expert Commentary on Enablers and Barriers

Health care delivery is undergoing a rapid change from traditional processes toward the use of digital health interventions and personalized medicine. This movement has been accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis as a response to the need to guarantee access to health care services while reducing the risk of contagion. Digital health scale-up is now also vital to achieve population-wide impact: it will only accomplish sustainable effects if and when deployed into regular health care delivery services. The question of how sustainable digital health scale-up can be successfully achieved has, however, not yet been sufficiently resolved. This paper identifies and discusses enablers and barriers for scaling up digital health innovations.

Health care delivery is undergoing a rapid change from traditional processes toward the use of digital health services, that is, “tools and services that use information and communication technologies to improve prevention, diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, and management of health-related issues and to monitor and manage lifestyle habits that impact health”. With this shift also comes a move to precision medicine and precision health.