As a leading cause of heart attacks, stroke, blindness and amputation, it’s no exaggeration to say that diabetes threatens the lives of the patients it affects. But it may surprise you to learn that the rapid rise in diabetes in the Middle East also has the potential to devastate health-care systems and even undermine whole economies if left to continue.
The proportion of people now living with diabetes in the Middle East is as high as 24 per cent.
The epidemic level of diabetes means that it is more than likely we each know someone with the disease. More startling still is the expectation that this number will double in the next 10 years.
The costs of this are staggering. Estimates suggest that $17 billion (Dh62.4bn) per year is spent on diabetes alone in the Middle East and this is expected to increase every year to cover the rising numbers of diabetics. This is a huge burden on the health-care system, and a substantial risk to the economic growth of the region.
It’s been widely accepted for some time that a major component of the solution to the diabetes problem depends on improving self-management – that is cultivating the skills in patients to better manage their lifestyle and thereby improve the outcomes of their illness. Clinical studies support the notion that better-informed, better-equipped patients tend to live longer, healthier lives and suffer from fewer complications that diabetes can cause.
Innovators have recognised that there are opportunities to use technology to help manage diabetes. Indeed, affordable, portable devices let us organise all parts of our lives, from socialising to banking, conveniently and securely. These technologies offer the opportunity for us to transform the way we support self-management too. The benefits for patients are clear – the convenience of accessible support that can be relied upon at any time of the day, resulting in improved health and better outcomes. Equally, for health-care providers, the unparalleled scalability and ability of technology to touch hard-to-reach populations is attractive, not to mention the potential for tremendous cost-savings.
However this is not without its challenges. If it were as simple as creating demand-driven technology products aimed at the health-care market, then, like other consumer areas, this problem would have been solved a decade ago.
Ironically this isn’t about the technology at all, but about managing the integration of these new services into current health-care systems, understanding the benefits and ensuring appropriate reimbursement, and navigating a nascent, but increasingly complex, regulatory environment, including that of privacy and security concerns among users.
There’s still a long way to go before we see the widespread use of digital therapeutics to improve health. But the push factor of rapidly depleting health-care budgets in the face of a region-wide epidemic of diabetes, and the pull factors of potentially huge and cost effective patient benefits are too strong to ignore. We need look no further than the successful use of online cognitive therapy to treat depression and anxiety to know that digital therapeutics hold the key to the future treatment of diabetes.
The current way of delivering care is simply no longer sustainable, which without doubt will be the catalyst that drives the health-care technological revolution. We have reached the tipping point where digital therapeutics have evolved from being a futuristic showcase to an everyday health-care solution used by patients and doctors alike.
Dr Matthew Goodman is medical director of Mapmyhealth, a UK health- care company