Mission
To address new opportunities in the healthcare sector emerging from the increasing use of digital technologies, specifically telemedicine and mobile devices (mHealth), and to evaluate the impact of information and communication technology on health outcomes.
Goal
- Establish a forum to address the opportunities and challenges emerging in the field of digital health
- Understand the role of health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) in the value assessment of digital health solutions
- Investigate the ways in which the validity and reliability of digital health technologies can be evaluated
- Promote the effective use of digital technologies to improve patient outcomes and efficiency of healthcare systems
Background
The term "digital health" is extremely broad and can include electronic medical records, electronic health records, telemedicine, mobile health (mHealth), and wireless health, amongst others. Utilization of digital health technologies provides opportunities to increase the quality of care, accuracy of healthcare analytics, and ensure greater safety owing to the patient follow-up. However, digital health represents a field fraught with challenges within the healthcare market. Not only are there numerous and different ways to classify and define “digital health” and related subtopics, there is also a lack of methodological approaches available to assess the value of digital health solutions. The usefulness along with the quality and reliability of health information gathered via digital health (eg mobile apps) must be addressed before one can feel confident of the reliability of digital health solutions and subsequent use by patients and researchers for assessing the value of healthcare interventions.
Manuscripts & Reports
- The PICOTS-ComTeC Framework for Defining Digital Health Interventions: An ISPOR Special Interest Group Report
- Digital Health Terms and Definitions Monographs
- How useful are Digital Health Terms for Outcomes Research?
- Virtual ISPOR 2021: Poster: How Do We Agree on A Definition for Digital Health? - Results of a Systematic Scoping Literature Review
- HTAi 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting: Poster: Piloting a Comprehensive Search for Ehealth Definitions in the Grey Literature: Preliminary Results from a Systematic Scoping Review
- HTAi 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting: Poster: Categorization of Digital Health Definitions for Outcomes Research Purposes - Results of a Systematic Scoping Literature Review
Presentations
- ISPOR Europe 2023: An Evidence Analysis Framework for Digital Health
- ISPOR Europe 2022: Quo Vadis? Evolving the ISPOR Digital Health SIG for 2023 and Beyond
- Virtual ISPOR Europe 2021: Do ICERs Support the Digital Revolution?
- Virtual ISPOR 2021: Quo vadis? Results of the Systematic Scoping Review for Digital Health Terms in the Literature
- ISPOR Midwest Chapter, February 2021: Digital Health and Applications in Health Outcomes Research
- ISPOR Europe 2020: Categorization and Definitions of Digital Health Interventions and Global Digital Health Updates
- ISPOR Europe 2019: ISPOR Digital Health Special Interest Group- Categorization and Definitions of Digital Health Interventions
Leadership
Chair-Elect
Brian Seal, MBA, RPh, BS, PhD
Past Chair
Vlad Zah, PhD, BSc
Chair
Anita Burrell, MBA, BA, MA
Operational Lead
Lisa Weiss
Working Groups
Member Engagement
These activities allow for a variety of members to participate and facilitates disseminating content in Webinars, Journal Clubs, Conference Sessions, etc.
Digital Health Member Community
Co-Chairs:
Artem Boltyenkov, MSc, MBA, PhD, BSc
Jagadeswara Rao Earla, MBA, PharmD, PhD
Hoda Fotovvat
Anne Kilburg, MSc
Key Project
Delphi Study on Defining Digital Health Interventions
Co-Chairs:
- Annette Champion, MBA, Healthcare Research Insights, Inc. Lake Forest, IL, USA
- Zsombor Zrubka, PhD, Óbuda University, Budapest, Hungary
Background and Objectives for Key Project
There is confusion in the terms which are currently employed so that sometimes these are used interchangeably with each other and even a single term may have more than one definition. For example. there are various definitions of mHealth (6), it has been defined as “mobile computing, medical sensor, and communication technologies for healthcare” (7) but also as “medical and public health practice supported by mobile devices, such as mobile phones, patient monitoring devices, personal digital assistants, and other wireless devices” (8). The lack of an understanding relating to the scope of a term is one reason why there is no universally accepted definition (9).
We anticipate that the scoping review will address an unmet need in the digital health field and health economics and outcomes research literature to allow a for number of gaps to be filled in the literature including establishing a definition of digital health for outcomes research, discussion of the categorization of different types of Digital Health Interventions and metrics/evidence standards, and further guidance / recommendations in this field.
Questions or ideas? Please send an email to digitalhealthsig@ISPOR.org