The Digital Health
Foundation
Using Digital Technologies to Support Precision Health Management
Contact usUsing Digital Technologies to Support Precision Health Management
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Our focus is you and your health. You the individual. Your physical health, your mental health, your social health.
Some might refer to this focus as personalised healthcare, patient-centred care or precision medicine. Most of the time, however, we’re not sick, so we're not patients. But we still care about our health and the health of the important people in our lives. This is an important distinction – because it’s how we manage our health when we’re healthy that matters most.
We live in exciting times. New technologies and digital tools have opened a world of possibilities. The smartphone is now ubiquitous – in Australia there are more active internet-connected smartphones than there are people.
It’s also now so cheap to produce and run powerful “cloud”-based sites and applications that multi-million dollar enterprises with tens of thousands of users are routinely launched using a credit card.
Health guidance can now come from experts anywhere in the world - or from new forms of Artificial Intelligence. Distributed Ledger technology (blockchain) promises to remove “red tape” costs and friction not just in healthcare, but throughout society.
These new digital technologies make it possible for you as an individual to become the focus of public health and general wellness initiatives. Initiatives focused on a disease, a body part, a condition, a behaviour or a circumstance are yesterday’s initiatives. They can all now be better-handled by considering you as a whole. That’s our mission.
We do this by:(1) Implementing key Digital Health projects and(2) Providing funding and other support for Digital Health research and development.
Being able to share personal information is more important than ever. But so too is the security of that personal information. That’s why one of our first initiatives is to apply digital technologies to the problem of identity, information sharing and security.
The TrigID project introduces a new distributed ledger identity technology. It lets your information be used for your benefit, without compromising your identity. Your medical information can be now be reliably located in any record, anywhere in the world. That information can also now be aggregated for use by distributed care teams and made available so that machines can look for patterns and cures.
Information is the key to providing personalised health. If technology is to help us with our health it needs more to work with. Google alone collects more data in a month than the entire world health sector does in a year.
Beth.ai is a health record managed by an AI but owned by you. It gives you real control of all of your health-related information and you control who sees what. And it allows you to collect the additional information that technology needs. Not just lab results and hospital reports, but also the day-to day things that are ultimately responsible for your health. Your daily activity, pictures of the food you’ve eaten, your observations and lifestyle choices. Beth converses with you using your mobile phone, learning form you and helping you to maintain the best possible health.
Six million Australians have elevated blood pressure – and the heart disease, stroke and kidney disease risks that come with it. Of these, four million don’t manage their hypertension and perhaps as many as two million don’t even know they have a problem.
BP120 is web destination with a simple visual scoring device that helps an individual to assess lifestyle factors contributing to their blood pressure. The device is designed to encourage a personal evaluation of hypertension risks. The destination also carries a targeted series of short articles and videos all designed to raise awareness, change behaviour and bring systolic blood pressure towards 120mm/hg.
Impact-of-technology studies that can inform research and development funding.
Technologies and strategies for uncovering individual health state.
Technologies and strategies for the safe sharing of health data.
Using digital tools to promoting health-focused behaviour change.
Using Distributed Ledger technology to improve health care.
Using chat-bots for long-term management of health.
Deep Learning from healthcare Big Data.
The health and social impact of electronic devices on children.
The mental health and social impact of social networks and other 24/7 communications technologies.