Letters to the Editor

Editor – We read with great interest the article by Utukuri et al on the lack of structured education in the field of digital health.¹ We concur with their conclusions that education within the field of digital health, and also wellness, needs further development within undergraduate education for all healthcare disciplines.

However, to concentrate solely on undergraduate education, fails to recognise that digital innovation is changing healthcare now. Adoption of digital innovation has also been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic with one example being the growing use of non-medical grade wearable devices for remote patient monitoring.² While we must prepare the next generation of healthcare providers for this digital future, it is equally important that our current workforce has the knowledge and skills to utilise such innovation.²

We suggest postgraduate education in digital health should focus on four themes.

• Basic IT skills and core digital literacy: an ongoing knowledge gap for a small subgroup of healthcare professionals.³

• Safe use of digital innovation: training staff to recognise and respond to the pitfalls and biases inherent in applying digital technology to previous, non-digital workflows.

• Data safety and quality: information governance considerations and the growing importance of structure in healthcare records through terminology standards, such as SNOMED CT.

• Advanced data science capabilities: although healthcare professionals might not create artificial intelligence algorithms, they should be familiar with the pre-requisites and recognise when such technology could be applied in a health setting.

Significant changes to postgraduate curriculum takes time, both in development and implementation.⁴ However, the process is already underway through the efforts of national bodies, such as the Faculty of Clinical Informatics and Health Data Research UK.^5,6 Together, with widely available and affordable online education tools (eg Udemy), this creates an excellent foundation for interested individuals to seek additional qualifications and education in digital health. Through their successes and failures, these individuals will become our champions for clinical informatics and, thereby, support the development of our postgraduate curriculum.