Editor's Note: Corrections have been made in the first and fourteenth paragraphs.

By Benjamin Ross

May 2, 2018 | Over five years ago, Ashish Atreja was intrigued with digital medicine and its potential to fill the gap between what hospitals and healthcare organizations wanted to be able to deliver for their patients and what they could deliver. Now, the Innovation Officer at Medicine Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai sees transformation for the entire industry in the next 5-10 years.

“It’s a journey from innovation to transformation,” Atreja tells Clinical Informatics News. “We’ll be able to look at technology currently in infancy that we’re dabbling with and see it become more mainstream.”

Non-EHR (electronic health record) technologies such as apps, analytics, and blockchain are all extremes of digital medicine, Atreja says. And while these technologies have been used for a patient’s care consultation, he believes we’re starting to see them increasingly utilized for clinical trial consultation.

“Whether it’s tracking the clinic-patient endpoints with cancers using apps or increasing [the patient’s] engagement. . . we’re seeing a convergence of the care world and the research world,” says Atreja. “This is all possible through digital medicine, making it much more exciting and much more affordable.”

So far most hospitals have implemented digital medicine into their practice, Atreja says, but there is so much more to be done by both payers and providers.

“Innovation is much more than confirmation,” Atreja says. “If you fast-track five years you will see major disruption in the clinical trial space with digital trials becoming the norm, surpassing the need for face-to-face trials by 2022.”

The sheer scale of innovation Atreja projects will require digital medicine and the healthcare space working hand in hand. “It goes both ways,” says Atreja. “When you bring in a new technology you often get feedback on what is working and what’s not, and this leads to new insight and new drug methods.”

Innovation runs the risk of various pitfalls, Atreja says, the most pressing of which is making sure these new technologies touch all segments of society.

“We can’t just make another digital device, we have to create digital bridges,” says Atreja. “We want to reduce the gap.”

Another pitfall Atreja is wary of is that healthcare providers (HCPs) are already swamped with technology, especially electronic health records (EHRs).

Mount Sinai has been working in the digital medicine space since Atreja founded the Sinai AppLab in 2012. The digital health lab hosts over 30 ongoing projects ranging from research to care.

“The genesis for [AppLab] was that we saw so much innovation happening, but not much reaching our patients,” Atreja says. “So we wanted to be facilitators, bringing this technology to our patients.”

Atreja says that the results of the digital health lab have been “game-changing.”

“Projects like the diabetes prevention program have worked with multiple success stories and become mainstream, even with a [CPT] code behind it,” Atreja says. “These technologies have really become transformational and mainstream, which I suspect to be the focus of clinical trials.”

Both Mount Sinai’s success and the rate of adoption by the industry makes Atreja hopeful for a more streamlined process for clinical trials.

“We have a unique opportunity to combine technology with clinical transformation, so that [digital medicine] is not seen as forceful but as evolutionary,” Atreja says. “If we do this the right way it can be very liberating.”

Editor’s Note: Ashish Atreja will be the plenary keynote speaker at the forthcoming Clinical Trial Innovation Summit in Boston, May 7-9.