Photos by Eli Burakian D'00
On October 29, nearly 200 members of the local, national, and international digital health community—including researchers, clinicians, healthcare administrators, payors, investors, experts from government and industry, and students and trainees—gathered for a daylong meeting at Dartmouth College to discuss the expanding field of digital therapeutics.
One of the fastest growing and most innovative areas within medicine and healthcare, clinically validated digital therapeutics refers to software that has been demonstrated to be safe and effective in preventing, treating, or managing a disease or disorder. These medical grade interventions or software tools hold the promise of improving access to care, quality of care, and treatment outcomes while lowering costs for a variety of patients and settings.
Last week’s summit, hosted by Geisel School of Medicine’s Center for Technology and Behavioral Health (CTBH), highlighted the evolving scientific, regulatory, policy, payor, industry, and implementation landscape of digital therapeutics.
“Our goal here today is to bring together very diverse perspectives and to use the dialogue generated from this event to help shape a vision for the future of how the most effective and engaging digital therapeutic tools can be broadly and sustainably accessible,” explained Lisa Marsch, PhD, director of CTBH, who extended a warm welcome to the summit’s attendees.
In her opening remarks, Marsch, a professor of psychiatry and of biomedical data science at Geisel, talked about the many demonstrated benefits of digital therapeutics, the innovative work being led in the space by the Dartmouth community, particularly in the realm of behavioral health, as well as some of the main opportunities and challenges that lie ahead for the field.
In the day’s first presentation, Andy Molnar, chief executive officer of Digital Therapeutics Alliance—a global non-profit trade association of industry leaders and stakeholders engaged in the evidence-driven advancement of digital therapeutics—provided an overview of the current state of digital therapeutics in the U.S. and across the globe.
Sonja Fulmer, deputy director of the Digital Health Center of Excellence at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), then outlined the overall mission and priorities of her office, as it works to advance and implement new policy approaches to medical device software and digital health technologies to better promote and protect public health.
In a series of interactive panel discussions that followed, featured guests and audience members had fruitful discussions in a number of key areas. These included pathways to prescription digital therapeutics, business models and regulatory considerations, guidance frameworks for digital therapeutics, and success stories of implementing clinically validated digital therapeutics into clinical practice.
In the day’s final session, three Dartmouth faculty affiliated with CTBH—Andrew Campbell, PhD, Albert Bradley 1915 Third Century Professor of Computer Science, Tam Vu, PhD, Thomas A. and Georgina Tugwell Russo 1977 Distinguished Professor in Computer Science, and Barry Schweitzer, PhD, associate director of the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship—gave brief presentations on their research in the areas of “Empowering Students to Flourish,” “Digital Health for Brain Health,” and “The Dartmouth Innovation Accelerator in Digital Health,” respectively.
Campbell has been a pioneer in using sensing technology to infer human behavior and surrounding context with specific applications in mental health and well-being. He and his team led the longest-running study of mobile behavioral sensing to date, working with 200 Dartmouth students over four years to better understand mental health during their time in college. They are now working to integrate the behavioral sensing data they collected with artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
“Massive data, deep learning, and AI will only make these kinds of existing models more accurate over time,” explained Campbell. “In five years, I see AI not only being capable of predicting mental illness, but also being able to deliver hyper-personalized interventions to keep students healthy, on track, and flourishing on college campuses.”
In her closing remarks, Marsch thanked all the participants, inviting them to attend the post-event reception and poster session. “It’s an incredibly exciting time to be working in this field—digital health is, undoubtedly, going to be a key part of the future of healthcare,” she said. “It’s going to be woven into the fabric of how we think about healthcare. And this is the community that can really work together to create that future and do it in a way that truly brings value to people’s lives.”
“It’s an incredibly exciting time to be working in this field—digital health is, undoubtedly, going to be a key part of the future of healthcare."
- Lisa Marsch, PhD
While much of the work to date in the field has been focused on mental health and substance use, digital health innovations have a growing array of applications—such as “PortalPal,” a project presented by Dartmouth graduate student Joseph Gatto at the poster session.
“It’s aimed to help providers at DH (Dartmouth Health) handle the massive increase in workload on the patient portal since COVID, which has led to increased provider burnout, economic losses, and reduced patient care,” he explained.
“I’m really excited to be able to work on a project like this, leveraging AI technology for healthcare,” said Gatto. “I think it has great potential to help streamline and improve communications between patients and their healthcare providers.”
