Digital health is the use of software, data, connected devices, sensors, and communication tools to support health care and wellness. It includes telehealth, electronic health records, patient portals, mobile health apps, wearable devices, remote patient monitoring, artificial intelligence-enabled tools, and health information systems.
This guide explains what digital health means, where you already see it in real care, and how careers in the field work. You’ll also learn how digital health differs from telehealth, health information technology, and health informatics, so you can choose tools, understand risks, or plan a career path with less guesswork.
What Is Digital Health?
Digital health is an umbrella term for technology used to support health care, wellness, prevention, diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, and care coordination. You can think of it as the connection point between health care, software, data, devices, and communication.
The United States Food and Drug Administration describes digital health as a field that includes mobile health, health information technology, wearable devices, telehealth, telemedicine, and personalized medicine. The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering also describes digital health as the use of information and communication technologies in medicine, including smartphone apps, wearable sensors, and telehealth platforms.
That means digital health is much broader than a video visit. When you check lab results in a patient portal, refill medication through an app, use a wearable sensor, receive a remote monitoring alert, or have clinical data shared across care settings, you’re already using digital health. The main idea is practical: better access, cleaner information flow, faster communication, and more useful health data.
Is Digital Health The Same As Telehealth?
No. Telehealth is one part of digital health, but digital health includes many other tools beyond remote appointments.
Telehealth usually means care delivered at a distance through video, phone, messaging, remote monitoring, or related communication tools. Digital health also includes electronic health records, patient portals, health apps, wearable devices, connected medical devices, health data analytics, and artificial intelligence-enabled medical software. If telehealth is one room in the house, digital health is the whole building.
This distinction matters when you’re comparing services or planning a career. A telehealth program manager may focus on virtual visits, scheduling, remote care workflows, and patient access. A digital health team may also include software developers, health data analysts, privacy specialists, clinical informatics staff, product managers, cybersecurity analysts, and implementation teams who connect tools to real clinical work.
What Are Common Examples Of Digital Health?
Common examples of digital health include telehealth visits, electronic health records, patient portals, mobile health apps, wearables, remote patient monitoring, e-prescribing, clinical decision support, artificial intelligence-enabled tools, and health information exchange.
An electronic health record is one of the most familiar examples. It stores clinical information used by care teams, and it can support lab ordering, medication lists, visit notes, referrals, billing workflows, and care coordination. A patient portal connects you to parts of that information, letting you view results, send secure messages, request refills, check appointments, and manage parts of your care online.
Mobile health apps and wearables cover a broad range. Some apps track habits, symptoms, medication reminders, or personal wellness data. Other tools connect to care teams, support remote patient monitoring, or function as medical device software. Wearables may collect data like heart rate, activity, sleep, or other signals, but the usefulness depends on accuracy, data sharing, clinical purpose, and whether a care team can act on the information.
Digital health also includes less visible systems. E-prescribing sends medication orders to pharmacies electronically. Health information exchange helps approved health organizations share patient information. Interoperability work focuses on helping different systems communicate, so your data can move more safely and usefully across clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, labs, and care teams.
How Is Digital Health Used In Real Life?
Digital health is used when you access records, receive care remotely, share health data, manage prescriptions, track symptoms, or help a clinician make a better-informed decision. The strongest uses solve a real care problem rather than adding another screen.
As a patient, you may use a portal to view test results, download visit summaries, send a message to your clinician, or help manage care for a family member through approved proxy access. If you have more than one doctor, you may also deal with more than one portal, which can make digital access useful and frustrating at the same time. That is one reason record sharing and portal organization matter so much.
As a clinician or care team member, digital health can support medication review, referral tracking, chronic condition monitoring, care gap outreach, and follow-up after visits. A remote monitoring program may send blood pressure, glucose, weight, or symptom data to a care team for review. An artificial intelligence-enabled imaging tool may support clinical review, but it still needs the right intended use, validation, workflow fit, and human oversight.
Why Does Digital Health Matter?
Digital health matters because it can make care more accessible, coordinated, measurable, and responsive. When it works well, it helps you get information sooner, communicate with care teams more easily, and connect separate pieces of care.
Access is one major benefit. Telehealth can reduce travel barriers for some visits, patient portals can make records available without a phone call, and digital scheduling can reduce back-and-forth communication. These tools don’t solve every access problem, since internet access, device access, language, disability support, and digital confidence still matter.
Coordination is another major benefit. Health care often involves primary care, specialists, pharmacies, labs, hospitals, caregivers, and insurers. Digital tools can reduce duplicate paperwork, support medication safety, and help teams compare information across visits. The value comes from fit: the tool needs to match the clinical task, protect data, and make work easier rather than adding extra burden.
What Digital Health Statistics Should You Know?
Several data points show that digital health is no longer a side topic. Electronic records, portals, apps, and clinician-facing tools are now part of routine care for many patients and health professionals.
United States office-based physician adoption of electronic health record systems reached 95.0%, and 83.6% used a certified electronic health record system. Patient portal use has also grown: 65% of individuals nationally were offered and accessed online medical records or a patient portal, up from 25% in earlier national tracking. App-based access to online medical records rose to 57%, showing that many people now manage health information from smartphones rather than web portals alone.
The same data also shows a real pain point: 59% of individuals had multiple online medical records or patient portals, yet only 7% used a portal-organizing app to combine information. Physician adoption also depends on trust and workflow. In American Medical Association research, physicians viewing digital health tools as an advantage for patient care increased from 85% to 93%, and the average number of digital tools used by physicians rose from 2.2 to 3.8.
What Are The Risks And Challenges Of Digital Health?
The main risks are privacy gaps, security threats, fragmented records, confusing user experiences, data overload, unequal access, weak integration, and unclear regulation for some products. A good digital health tool needs evidence, usability, data protection, and a clear role in care.
Privacy is one of the first things you should check. Different rules can apply depending on whether the tool is used by a health care provider, a health plan, a personal health record vendor, an app company, a device maker, or another type of organization. Some tools are regulated as medical devices or medical device software, and some wellness apps may not be reviewed the same way.
Workflow is another common failure point. If a wearable sends too many low-value alerts, a portal creates message overload, or a system forces clinicians to re-enter data, the tool can create work instead of reducing it. For patients, digital health can also feel scattered when every clinic has a separate portal and login. The best tools reduce friction, explain what data is used for, and give the right information to the right person at the right time.
What Careers Can You Get In Digital Health?
Digital health careers include clinical informatics, health information technology, software development, data science, cybersecurity, product management, implementation, telehealth operations, user experience design, medical device software, and privacy or compliance roles. You don’t always need a clinical background, but you do need to understand how health care work actually happens.
If you like clinical workflows, consider health informatics specialist, clinical informatics analyst, electronic health record analyst, implementation specialist, or telehealth program manager roles. These jobs often involve translating between clinicians, technical teams, administrators, and vendors. You may work on order sets, documentation tools, patient portal setup, scheduling workflows, reporting, training, and change management.
If you like technical work, digital health includes software developer, quality assurance analyst, data scientist, data analyst, cybersecurity analyst, integration engineer, and interoperability specialist roles. Related Bureau of Labor Statistics occupations show strong growth in areas tied to digital health, including health information technologists and medical registrars, software developers and testers, data scientists, information security analysts, and medical and health services managers. Use those figures as related labor data, not a promise that every digital health job has the same pay or growth rate.
What Skills Do You Need For Digital Health Careers?
You need a mix of health care knowledge, data literacy, communication, privacy awareness, and role-specific technical skills. The exact mix depends on whether you want to work in clinical workflow, software, analytics, product, privacy, security, operations, or leadership.
Start with health care basics. Learn how appointments, referrals, prescriptions, lab orders, documentation, billing workflows, patient communication, and care coordination work. You don’t need to become a clinician for every role, but you do need enough domain knowledge to avoid building tools that look good in a demo and fail in a clinic.
Then match your skill-building to a track. Technical roles may require programming, testing, cloud systems, application programming interfaces, databases, or data engineering. Analytics roles may require statistics, data cleaning, visualization, and model evaluation. Product, implementation, and operations roles depend more on workflow mapping, stakeholder communication, project management, training, vendor review, and measuring whether the tool improves access, quality, safety, efficiency, or patient experience.
How Do You Get Started In Digital Health?
Start by choosing a direction: clinical workflow, technical build, analytics, privacy and security, product, operations, or health system leadership. Then learn the language of health care technology and build proof that you can solve real workflow or data problems.
Useful terms to learn include electronic health record, electronic medical record, patient portal, health information exchange, interoperability, Health Level Seven International, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, telehealth, remote patient monitoring, Software as a Medical Device, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. You don’t need to master every term at once. You need enough fluency to ask better questions and avoid confusing similar tools.
Build experience through health system roles, vendor support roles, internships, analytics projects, implementation work, operations projects, quality improvement work, help desk roles, product work, or certifications aligned with your target job. If you’re coming from medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, software, design, analytics, or another field, map your current strengths to a digital health problem. A clinician may bring workflow credibility, a developer may bring build skills, and an analyst may bring measurement skills.
What Is The Future Of Digital Health?
The future of digital health points toward more connected records, more app-based access, more remote monitoring, more artificial intelligence-enabled tools, and stronger expectations for privacy, evidence, usability, and workflow fit. The winning tools will be the ones that solve care problems people can feel.
Expect patient access to keep shifting toward mobile experiences. More people already use apps to reach online medical records, and health systems are under pressure to make portals easier to use across multiple care sites. The next improvement is not just “more apps.” It is better identity management, clearer permissions, cleaner data exchange, and fewer dead ends when patients need help.
Artificial intelligence will also keep expanding in digital health, especially in imaging, documentation support, triage assistance, operations, and data review. The important question is not whether a tool uses artificial intelligence. You should ask what task it supports, what data it uses, how it was evaluated, how errors are caught, and how it fits into clinical responsibility.
What Is Digital Health?
- Digital health uses software, data, connected devices, sensors, and communication tools to support health care and wellness.
- It includes telehealth, portals, apps, wearables, remote monitoring, electronic records, and artificial intelligence-enabled tools.
Where Digital Health Fits In Your Next Decision
Digital health is not one product, job title, or trend. It is the practical use of technology to connect people, health data, care teams, and decisions. If you’re a patient, focus on tools that improve access, clarity, privacy, and follow-through. If you’re planning a career, choose a track that matches your strengths, then learn enough health care workflow to make your skills useful. The best digital health work starts with a real care need and ends with a tool people can trust, use, and measure.
References
- United States Food and Drug Administration — What Is Digital Health?
- National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering — Digital Health
- World Health Organization — Global Strategy On Digital Health
- Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology — Health Information Technology And Health Information Exchange Frequently Asked Questions
- Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology — Electronic Health Records And Their Benefits
- Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology — Individuals’ Access And Use Of Patient Portals And Smartphone Health Apps
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics — National Electronic Health Records Survey Results
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — Telemedicine Use Among Adults With And Without Diagnosed Prediabetes Or Diabetes
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics — Telemedicine Use Among Physicians By Physician Specialty
- American Medical Association — Digital Health Care Study Findings
- United States Food and Drug Administration — Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Medical Devices
- United States Department of Health and Human Services — Resources For Mobile Health Apps Developers
- United States Department of Health and Human Services — Privacy And Security For Telehealth
- Federal Trade Commission — Health Breach Notification Rule Update
- United States Bureau of Labor Statistics — Health Information Technologists And Medical Registrars
- United States Bureau of Labor Statistics — Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, And Testers
- United States Bureau of Labor Statistics — Data Scientists
- United States Bureau of Labor Statistics — Information Security Analysts
- United States Bureau of Labor Statistics — Medical And Health Services Managers
Nirdosh Jagota is Managing Partner at GRQ Biotech Advisors with 30+ years in the biotech industry. A former executive at Amgen, Genentech/Roche, Merck, and Pfizer, he has led >25 NDAs/BLAs/MAAs and hundreds of INDs across global regulatory, quality, and compliance.