Senior living and care providers, and groups that serve them, are trying to find tech solutions such as artificial intelligence-enabled software to help lower costs while maintaining quality services.
But at least one study shows that 80% of digital health products are unvetted, which means providers must evaluate on their own whether new tools accomplish what they promise.
A new assessment framework was recently developed by two healthcare organizations to specifically audit technology that either supplants or assists traditional care roles, such as care management tools or remote patient monitoring.
The assessment tool is a joint project by the Peterson Health Technology Institute and the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review; the two organizations announced the release of the assessment last week.
“The digital health market is flooded with an overwhelming number of new technologies claiming to transform healthcare delivery in all sorts of ways,” Peterson Center on Healthcare Executive Director Caroline Pearson said in a statement. “Now is the time to step back and determine which tools actually have the evidence to support their claims. PHTI will cut through the noise.”
The timeline PHTI gave for conducting such reviews is at least five months, and the criteria to evaluate those tools will include a product’s health benefits, economic impact and effects on privacy. The assessment will go as far as recommending whether a specific technology should be adopted.
Despite the conclusive evaluation, the framework is not meant just for providers but also for developers of those technologies and investors, PHTI states on its website.
Other recent tools or frameworks meant to audit new healthcare technologies focus exclusively on artificial intelligence, and under what conditions AI models, in their present form, can assist organizations.
