2015 American Journal of Gastroenterology Lecture: How Digital Health Will Transform Gastroenterology

Our patients spend most of their lives far away from an examination room. If we are truly going to capture our patients' attention and engage them in their care, then we must reach beyond the four walls of the clinic, hospital, or endoscopy suite. This is the vision of the digital health movement-an effort to monitor patients remotely and dynamically with mobile health ("mHealth") smartphone applications, electronic health record portals, social media, and wearable biosensors to improve health care outside of the clinical trenches. This article explores how advances in digital health may improve health-care delivery, focusing on gastroenterology and hepatology. It describes how technology can monitor patients remotely, improve face-to-face care, drive clinical decisions, and offer value to health-care organizations, their patients, and their staff. The article also describes pitfalls and shortcomings of digital technologies and concludes by describing a new model for how digital health can be deployed at scale to improve coordination and outcomes of care.