Top 5 Misconceptions and Questions about Public Health Tech

1. What is public health tech anyway?
Public Health Tech, is any tech product or tech-enabled service that prevents the onset of disease or addresses the needs of medically vulnerable populations. This is an emerging niche of Digital Health growing due to the collision of digital health and public health. This collision has been catalyzed by two expanding pressures:

Digital health failures: After a five year boom, 2016 was not a kind year to digital health. According to Rock Health, digital health VC funding made a slight dip to $4.2 billion after a record $4.5 billion in 2015. The overwhelming sense is that the party was over and the industry had entered the “trough of disillusionment.” A few of the factors that brought the over-exuberance down to earth were a renewed focus on evidentiary standards and a  reevaluation of the role of technology. Much of the boom was driven by sentiments that technology was the panacea even those most solutions were built around the fee-for-service model, that validation and claims would inevitably emerge with widescale adoption, and that the adoption of technology would inherently lead to reduced costs. None of these assumption have proven to be true.
Public health spending crunch: Public Health spending had increased significantly from $39 per capita (inflation adjusted) to $275 per capita from 1960 to 2002, but a recent study has found that it has since been declining. Most of the increase in funding (approximately 80-90%) was a resu...

Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - February 1, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Health IT Source Type: blogs