There are gaps in traditional treatments that can be filled by digital therapeutics.
In contrast to offering quick fixes to your clients, there is growing evidence that adding digital therapeutics to your treatment arsenal can be most valuable for your patients since they will allow you to refer a non-medicated, non-invasive intervention to them; you will be able to monitor their progress remotely; and you can devise a holistic health plan that may be outside your normal scope of practice.
What You Should Know About Digital Therapeutics
Consider a digital therapeutic as a teammate, not a competitor.
Getting the right digital therapeutic to the right person can serve everyone, and they can become valuable additions to your treatment toolkit.
Your treatment plans can become more holistic and better integrated with your clients’ lifestyles and health goals, and some could even help you expand your services in new directions. In the case of dieticians who know their clients would benefit from mindfulness practices or who needed additional stress and anxiety support, they could recommend a digital mental health therapeutic.
Your clients may benefit from using a digital therapeutic as part of their treatment plan, leading to better, more sustainable health outcomes.
Digital therapeutics can be unfamiliar to healthcare providers. Nonetheless, you should be aware that in the past seven years, US investments in digital therapeutics have grown by an average of 40% per year to reach more than US$1 billion in 2018.
In addition to evidence of their effectiveness, research has shown improvements in patients’ outcomes when digital therapeutics are used alone or in conjunction with conventional treatments for disorders such as cancer, ADHD, asthma, IBS, menopause, and insomnia
There are Many Benefits to Digital Therapeutics
A digital therapeutic can be recommended to your patients as either a frontline treatment tool or as part of their integrated care plan.
Digital Therapeutics Alliance cites several benefits of digital therapeutics including:
- Reducing the stigma related to face-to-face delivery of certain traditional therapies
- As a healthcare practitioner, you are now less limited in the care you can offer your clients as a result of location
- Assisting practitioners to work with underserved populations such as those living in rural areas
- Due to the availability of some digital therapeutics in a variety of languages, miscommunications can be minimized
- Supporting clients with disabilities by improving access
- Clients get more meaningful results and insights based on their individual goals and outcomes.
Also, digital therapeutics may be particularly attractive to clients who have tried traditional therapies without success or who are contraindicated to them.
Bloom Provides Mental Health Support
Bloom provides self-guided therapy. Through video-guided interactive therapy sessions based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), it empowers its users to be their own therapists.
With a digital therapeutic like Bloom, healthcare practitioners are able to develop a more holistic approach that integrates closely with a patient’s lifestyle. In the Bloom app, for instance, users can keep a journal in which they can jot down their thoughts on their CBT sessions or anything that will help them to retrain their brain.
So, if you were a nutritionist, incorporating an app like Bloom into your toolkit could help you work with clients to shift their mindset about their eating pattUsers of the Bloom app, which offers a journaling feature, can jot down thoughts about their CBT sessions or anything else that gets them working toward retraining their brains and thinking