Digital doctors

We are looking at digital tools that help doctor/patient relations.

Doctors can be more effective with digital tools.

The digital patient has been talked about and targeted. Now we are starting to see the rise of the digital doctor. Doctors had to pivot from 99% face-to-face visits to 90% telehealth visits in 2020. This quick adaptation of technology and change in the landscape of medicine did a couple of things.

First, it pushed doctors to think about their services in a new way. Before the Covid pandemic, most doctors were stuck in the confines of a clinic with geographical constraints. Patients needed to physically come to them. Now, there is the understanding that patients can find the doctor that they need and they look outside their geographical areas for them.

Second, the digital doctor after Covid can be an expert in a small niche of services and be very successful. With an increase in the accessibility via Telehealth, the new digital doctor can market themselves to a slice of the population has the condition that they are an expert in treating. This will allow super-specialized practices to become centers of excellence in the way that centers of excellence have faltered in the past few years.

The digital doctor is becoming more and more of a player in the health tech space. Over the past two years, health tech companies have used resources to build out tools. Unfortunately, there has been a contracture and mass layoffs in some of these companies on the tech side. It is now up to the digital doctors to use these tools and for companies to lean on the expert physicians that will attract patients.

In the next digital doctor newsletter, we will discuss the importance of technology connecting a patient with a trusted physician. We will evaluate this premise: Technology should be a tool that facilitates a relationship and not a tool that points to a service.