Clinical Integration of Digital Solutions in Health Care: An Overview of the Current Landscape of Digital Technologies in Cancer Care

Abstract

Digital health constitutes a merger of both software and hardware technology with health care delivery and management, and encompasses a number of domains, from wearable devices to artificial intelligence, each associated with widely disparate interaction and data collection models. In this review, we focus on the landscape of the current integration of digital health technology in cancer care by subdividing digital health technologies into the following sections: connected devices, digital patient information collection, telehealth, and digital assistants. In these sections, we give an overview of the potential clinical impact of such technologies as they pertain to key domains, including patient education, patient outcomes, quality of life, and health care value. We performed a search of PubMed ( www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed ) and www.ClinicalTrials.gov for numerous terms related to digital health technologies, including digital health, connected devices, smart devices, wearables, activity trackers, connected sensors, remote monitoring, electronic surveys, electronic patient-reported outcomes, telehealth, telemedicine, artificial intelligence, chatbot, and digital assistants. The terms health care and cancer were appended to the previously mentioned terms to filter results for cancer-specific applications. From these results, studies were included that exemplified use of the various domains of digital health technologies in oncologic care. Digital health encompasses the integration of a vast array of technologies with health care, each associated with varied methods of data collection and information flow. Integration of these technologies into clinical practice has seen applications throughout the spectrum of care, including cancer screening, on-treatment patient management, acute post-treatment follow-up, and survivorship. Implementation of these systems may serve to reduce costs and workflow inefficiencies, as well as to improve overall health care value, patient outcomes, and quality of life.