In this episode of Impetus Digital‘s Fireside Chat series, I sat down with Tjaša Zajc, MedsClub Community Developer and Communication Specialist at Better and the Founder & Host of the Faces of Digital Health podcast, for a discussion around international differences in the speed of digital transformation in healthcare and the role of digital technologies throughout the patient journey, including for medication management.
Here is a sneak peek of our conversation:
Q: As somebody who is dealing with a chronic condition, what are you–or some of the people that you have spoken to from a patient perspective–finding is currently missing in the systems that we’re using today in healthcare?
A: I think an interesting aspect of chronic patients is that your perception of the disease really changes over time and obviously it depends on the state. If you’re a little bit worse and the disease is active, it’s different than when it’s not active. But, in general, it very soon becomes just a part of you while you’re leading your daily life.
From that perspective, I think it’s sometimes good to remind patients that they do need to take their disease seriously. I have been a chronic patient for 17 years and at the beginning, you face many unknown situations. You don’t know what the disease is, you don’t know what can happen, you don’t know anything. At that time, it’s really good to have a lot of information, and we have a lot of that today with digital health and communication tools.
But then, over time, you get used to it. You can very quickly start to think that you know the disease and how to manage it better than doctors, and when that happens, I think we just need some sort of a reminder that maybe “You don’t know as much as you think.” There’s a danger of overconfidence about how you should manage your care. I think that’s an important thing that is not addressed that much. Depending on how you perceive your state, that’s going to determine how fast you’re going to the doctor, how fast you’re going to look for care, and what your outcomes will be…
For more of our discussion, you can watch the whole Fireside Chat with Tjaša Zajc, or listen to the podcast version, below.
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Impetus Digital is the spark behind sustained healthcare stakeholder communication, collaboration, education, and insight synthesis. Our best-in-class technology and professional services ensure that life science organizations around the world can easily and cost-effectively grow and prosper—from brand or idea discovery to development, commercialization, execution, and beyond—in collaboration with colleagues, customers, healthcare providers, payers, and patients.