Nowadays, more and more activities are centralized in digital spaces. We live in an interconnected society, we share things on the internet, and we buy goods and services online.
This process has been accented since the beginning of our decade with the widespread use of digital spaces in services that we were not expecting.
In fact, digitization proved itself to be deeply useful in some areas to relieve people from tedious tasks or to increase the efficiency of services.
Within the years the use of electronic devices also gained importance in the healthcare sphere yet for the better. Startups were created to enhance and speed up the digitization of this branch of our society’s services to meet the population’s exceptions.
Nik Seth, founder of Holm Care – a social startup helping the elderly in their own homes by monitoring care remotely and helping staff update care records in real-time – confessed to NHS England the benefits of this practice.
His experience living in Estonia pushed him to develop such a company. Indeed, back in Estonia, he was confronted with a system where any medical records were easy to reach from any hospital in the country and patients were able to issue a digital prescription to collect medicine at any pharmacy in the country.
Consequently, the founder of the startup raised the thorny issue of paper records that many European countries are encountering. Indeed, because in Estonia health records can be communicated digitally between hospitals and health and social care providers, there is no issue of lost records in urgent situations or complex medical history.
What is ironic is that thanks to digitization and the use of digital devices, social staff, and healthcare providers can add more humanity to their dialogue with their patients, using less time to find good records and having more time to exchange with people.
Finally, the founder of Holm Care concludes with the potential future use of artificial intelligence in health and social care to help personnel work more efficiently and detect diseases in a faster way.
Indeed, artificial intelligence can automate a large amount of human work while speeding up research. All this process is therefore based on algorithms able to handle huge amounts of data in order to at the end identify a particular disease the human eye would have never detected.