Why Digital Health Tools Focus on Chronic Conditions

Digital health technologies offer benefits for a wide variety of patients, but perhaps one of the biggest and most beneficial areas of focus for developers is for patients with chronic conditions.

Today, there are applications for medication adherence and management of diabetes and blood pressure. But why is that?

Luke Bonney, co-founder and CEO at Redox, explained at HLTH2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada that engagement is a big reason.

There's a really interesting way to frame this, which is: What's the intersection of health and healthcare? And you can actually see in a recent Redox survey that we kind of asked both

those questions.

Health you can think about as “how do I stay healthy?” “How do I prevent getting sick?” We see a whole burgeoning class of technology around “How should I track my fitness and how do I think about the things that keep me from becoming sick?”

Parallel to that we see a whole burgeoning class of consumer-facing technology around managing chronic disease. Why is that true? It's true because these are key moments in time when you and I typically act as consumers and have an incentive to really engage in our care.

So, if you're thinking about building tools and technology as a software developer, what you want is an engaged audience. For that reason, we see the initial early adoption, both from the actual consumer side as well as from those building the tools designed for chronic disease management.

Editor's note: This transcription has been lightly edited for style and clarity.

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