A new report published by The COMMONWEALTH FUND outlines numerous important and relevant recommendations founded on the premise that Digital Health Technologies will work toward improving population health, improving care experiences, and reducing per capita costs of care.

Digital Health Technologies have the potential to transform and disrupt the health care delivery system by empowering consumers -and patients- to play an active role in their care and define what services are important to them. They also can help health care providers, insurers, and others analyze a growing body of data to identify unmet needs and measure treatment outcomes to better tailor patient interventions.

The recommendations include:

• Defining opportunities by focusing on the nation’s greatest health and delivery system problems.
• Closing knowledge gaps among consumers, technology developers, entrepreneurs, health care executives, and investors through networking and learning events.
• Creating test beds in care settings to validate the impact of innovations on quality, outcomes, and costs as well as on clinical and consumer experiences.
• Enabling consumer-centered design and valuations of new technologies.
• Addressing barriers to uptake, including operational factors and challenges related to an evolving reimbursement and policy landscape.

The report outlines challenges faced by Health IT and makes recommendations for overcoming them, with the explicit goal of encouraging clinicians, developers, and entrepreneurs to focus on the needs of patients with complex and costly medical and behavioral health conditions.

Read the full report here.