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Creating boundaries to empower digital health technology

  • Honor Hsin (a1) and John Torous (a2)

Summary

The potential of digital health tools such as smartphones and sensors to increase access to and enhance delivery of healthcare is well known. However, a lack of regulation and delineation between those technologies seeking to offer direct clinical diagnostics and treatments and those involving clinical care enhancements or direct-to-consumer resources has led to patient and clinician confusion about the appropriate use and role of digital health. Here, we propose that creating boundaries and better defining the scope of digital health technology will advance the field through matching the right use cases with the right tools. We further propose that ethical clinicians, as stewards of standard of care, are well suited to uphold these boundaries and to safeguard best practices in digital health.

Declaration of interest

H.H. is an employee of Verily Life Sciences and owns equity in this company. The views expressed here are those of the authors and are not official views of Verily Life Sciences.

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Copyright

COPYRIGHT: © The Royal College of Psychiatrists 2018
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Corresponding author

Correspondence: Honor Hsin, Verily Life Sciences, 269 East Grand Avenue, South San Francisco, CA 94080, USA. Email: hhsin@verily.com

References

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  • Access
  • Open access

Creating boundaries to empower digital health technology

  • Honor Hsin (a1) and John Torous (a2)

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  • Access
  • Open access

Creating boundaries to empower digital health technology

  • Honor Hsin (a1) and John Torous (a2)
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