The use of digital health in heart rhythm care

ABSTRACT

Introduction

Digital health is a broad term that includes telecommunication technologies to collect, share and manipulate health information to improve patient health and health care services. With the growing use of wearables, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other novel technologies, digital health is particularly relevant to the field of cardiac arrhythmias, with roles pertinent to education, prevention, diagnosis, management, prognosis, and surveillance.

Areas covered

This review summarizes information on the clinical use of digital health technology in arrhythmia care and discusses its opportunities and challenges.

Expert opinion

Digital health has begun to play an essential role in arrhythmia care regarding diagnostics, long-term monitoring, patient education and shared decision making, management, medication adherence, and research. Despite remarkable advances, integrating digital health technologies into healthcare faces challenges, including patient usability, privacy, system interoperability, physician liability, analysis and incorporation of the huge amount of real-time information from wearables, and reimbursement. Successful implementation of digital health technologies requires clear objectives and deep changes to existing workflows and responsibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital health
• Artificial intelligence
• arrhythmia
• atrial fibrillation
• cardiovascular disease

Article highlights

• Remote monitoring of a patient’s heart rhythm is now possible via widespread and relatively cheap consumer devices.

• With artificial intelligence and machine learning, algorithms have become more performant in detecting irregular heart rhythms, especially atrial fibrillation.

• Mobile health devices have a sensitivity of up to 95% in detecting atrial fibrillation, making them adequate tools to screen for atrial fibrillation in low-risk patients.

• Integrating mobile health technologies such as phones, smartwatches, and applications into patient care improves clinical outcomes.

• Obtaining quality data, ensuring secure storage and transmission of the data, and integration in existing electronic medical records remain the principal challenges in this field.

Declaration of interest

GM Marcus is a consultant for Johnson & Johnson (as a steering committee member of the Heartline trail), and is a consultant for and holds equity in InCarda.

The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This study received no funding.