Kyan Safavi is the David F. Torchiana Health Policy and Management Fellow at the Massachusetts General Physicians Organization and an instructor at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Anesthesia, Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston.
Simon C. Mathews is an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Johns Hopkins Medicine, and head of clinical innovation, Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, both in Baltimore, Maryland.
Health Aff (Millwood). 2019 Jan;38(1):115-123. doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.2018.05081.
Digital health companies hold promise to address major health care challenges, though little has been published on their impact. We identified the twenty top-funded private US-based digital health companies to analyze their products and services, related peer-reviewed evidence, and the potential for impact on patients with high-burden conditions. Data analytics (including artificial intelligence and big data) was the most common company type. Companies producing biosensors had the greatest funding. Publications were concentrated among a small number of companies. Healthy volunteers were most commonly studied. Few studies enrolled high-burden populations, and few measured their impact in terms of outcomes, cost, or access to care. These data suggest that leading digital health companies have not yet demonstrated substantial impact on disease burden or cost in the US health care system. Our findings indicate the importance of fostering an environment, with regard to policy and the consumer market, that encourages the development of evidence-based, high-impact products.
数字健康公司有望解决主要的医疗保健挑战，但关于它们的影响却鲜有报道。我们确定了 20 家资金最雄厚的美国本土数字健康公司，以分析它们的产品和服务、相关同行评议证据，以及对高负担疾病患者产生影响的潜力。数据分析（包括人工智能和大数据）是最常见的公司类型。生产生物传感器的公司获得的资金最多。出版物集中在少数几家公司中。健康志愿者是最常被研究的对象。很少有研究纳入高负担人群，也很少有研究从结果、成本或获得医疗保健的角度衡量其影响。这些数据表明，领先的数字健康公司尚未证明它们在美国医疗保健系统中对疾病负担或成本产生了重大影响。我们的研究结果表明，重要的是要营造一种政策和消费者市场环境，鼓励开发基于证据、具有高影响力的产品。
