Digital Health Education for Health Professionals: What are the Next Steps?

I have served as an academic for the past eight years as an assistant and now associate professor of pharmacy practice, and during this time, my primary concern has been getting health professionals into digital health. It goes without saying it has been an uphill battle, and only in the past 12-24 months have I finally seen significant traction, primarily due to the ongoing Covid-19 Pandemic. 

I could spend a lot of time detailing my thoughts and concerns, but it may be best first to summarize some of my outputs if you want a more in-depth analysis before I launch into the broader concerns.

Digital Health and Healthcare Professional Education Publications

• Integrating mHealth and mobile technology education into the pharmacy curriculum (2014)

• Using a hackathon for interprofessional health education opportunities (2015)

• Leveraging mobile smart devices to improve interprofessional communications in inpatient practice setting: A literature review (2015)

• Digital health evaluation workshop for interprofessional healthcare students (2017)

• From ideation to practice: How pharmacists and students can leverage hackathons and innovation labs to accelerate innovation in pharmacy (2019)

• Integrating Digital Health into the Curriculum-Considerations on the Current Landscape and Future Developments (2020)

Other Articles

• WHY NEGLECTING DIGITAL HEALTH IS A DANGER FOR THE PHARMACY PROFESSION

• BRINGING DIGITAL HEALTH AND MEDICATION ADHERENCE INTO THE CLASSROOM

• WHY PHARMA AND DIGITAL HEALTH COMPANIES NEED AN EDUCATION STRATEGY

• CREATING A 'DIGITAL PHARMACIST' FOR THE FUTURE OF PHARMACY CARE

Finally, I have a series of videos on my YouTube channel detailing what I think at more depth you can peruse.

How do we get Digital Health into Medical Education?

I have given multiple international and national talks on this topic and serve as a thought leader and subject matter expert on engaging digital health in education for the upcoming future of patient care. Nonetheless, I think the following frameworks I have created with others may best represent where I think inroads could be made.

First, particularly in pharmacy, we'd need to identify what job opportunities or possibilities exist. Now, this is an older framework, but I think it establishes some roles that would need to be trained for eventually.

Second, how do we integrate digital health into medical education? I would argue there are different phases, and if you read my work, you'll see we are just on the cusp of beginning down a more formalized pathway of engaging current and upcoming health professionals.

Lastly, creating clinical experts is a need which we are short-staffed, at this time, if we want to expand down further phase integration. This will be one of the most enormous hurdles to cross, and where I see a lot of effort is needed.

Now this is just a summary of my key points and thoughts, and I'd welcome your thoughts or input!