The Digital Therapeutics Alliance Looks to Push the Telehealth Envelope

Telehealth and mHealth are pushing the healthcare ecosystem further toward value-based care, and a key ingredient in this transition is digital therapeutics.

Digital therapeutics is “something that is new, but it's definitely something that people could hopefully get their heads around, given that it's building upon a lot of what has already been in the healthcare ecosystem,” says Megan Coder, executive director of the three-year-old Digital Therapeutics Alliance. “it's a product that is using software, and that software is generating an intervention that's being delivered to a patient, and that clinical grade intervention is making the claim to prevent, manage or treat a medical disease or disorder.”

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That kind of intervention merits more scrutiny, Coder said during a recent episode of Xtelligent Healthcare Media’s Healthcare Strategies podcast series. And that’s what the DTA is here for.

“Since you are making this high level of claims, you really need to ensure that you have the right level of rigor behind it, and safety and efficacy,” she said. “So we, as DTA, we formed really with the goal of talking about what are those types of principles that we believe all digital therapeutic should adhere to, to really ensure that a patient, clinician, payer can really trust that the product is doing what it says it's doing, given that it's really working on a disease state.”

The field is vast and expanding, ranging from mHealth tools that help people living with diabetes to track and manage their care at home to wearables and virtual reality platforms that treat chronic pain. The idea behind the technology is to augment or replace the visit to the doctor’s office and reduce the need for medication, more complex care and perhaps even hospitalizations and surgery.

Aside from being a resource for regulatory agencies like the US Food and Drug Administration, Coder says the DTA will “work … across the broader industry … to create more of a harmonized understanding” of the uses and benefits of digital therapeutics. This includes urging the payer industry to cover more of these services so that providers, in turn, will be incentivized to use them.

And helping this branch of the connected health tree to grow.

“As this evolves, we're going to see more conditions being addressed,” she said. “We'll start to see more of a holistic landscape of how these technologies are interplaying with different therapies. So I am nothing but excited, but with that to say, there's still a lot of work … in helping policymakers understand how to regulate these, both (in the) US and in all these other countries that are really taking this very seriously.”

”We're looking at how do you do the best type of evaluation from a health economic standpoint?” she added. “We're looking at how do we actually evaluate how patients are performing, and are there new metrics we need to start to consider that may not have been in play before? So how do we really make sure we're leveraging the data we have in a smart way, for again, that intentional purpose of going back to the patient caregiver level, and addressing their needs as they continue to evolve.”