How to deploy digital biomarkers in healthcare delivery to unlock person-centered care

Digital biomarkers are among the first to witness any early symptoms of disease and to predict treatment outcomes. Defined as quantifiable physiological and behavioral data, they connect patients with their care teams. Here is how we at Roche harness their potential to create a continuum of care.

I have heard the words “If only we had recognized these symptoms earlier…” so many times in my life, and I know this is something that is not uncommon at all. One of the many reasons for this is the physical distance between health professionals and patients—gaps that can be bridged with digital biomarkers. By using sensors, wearables, implantables, and health monitoring solutions, we can track the data depicting the health status and treatment outcomes to intervene at an early stage of the disease or when someone with a chronic disease faces a relapse.

Digital biomarkers have another superpower, as they can seamlessly integrate care into the patients’ lives. There are days when they are alone with their disease and experience doubts or questions impacting their quality of life and well-being. A simple sensor on the wrist can make a significant change, giving them the comfort of care in their home settings. 

The patient’s journey takes place mostly at home

Let me first explain how we understand digital biomarkers at Roche. My colleague, Christian Gossens , Chapter Lead of Digital Biomarkers at Roche, calls it “objectively and continuously quantifying the disease progression that patients suffer from.” 

How it works in practice can be illustrated with one of Roche’s digital health solutions: Parkinson’s Mobile Assessment Suite. This enables the quantification of health status and disease progression through active tests, surveys (including the tracking of patient-reported outcomes), and passive monitoring, with in-clinic tests serving as anchors and complements to each of these methods.

“Every day is different for the patients, and the doctors need to have access to what the patient is experiencing when they cannot see them at home,” said Christian. Understanding disease progression in groups of volunteers is building the scientific evidence to personalize these approaches for clinical care cases – when physicians need advanced support to treat individual patients.

Healthcare monitoring implementation goes far beyond sensors 

Digital biomarkers are just one layer of a complex care environment composed of digital infrastructure, software to translate the data into insights, hardware (equipment, sensors), and services.

The last element involves answering many questions: To what extent can the interpretation of data be automated? What procedures follow data interpretation? What data availability benefits the patient? Together with our partners and customers, we address them one by one in order to seamlessly adapt digital solutions to the workflows.

Techno-organizational aspects must go hand in hand with a range of other auxiliary measures. Here, I would like to highlight another layer of this ecosystem: education and transparency. Applying digital biomarkers requires trusted relationships between healthcare providers and their patients, built upon secure data processing, privacy, and the benefits the patients gain by providing their data.

AI and digital biomarkers make a perfect duo

Of course, no human has the time and capacity to analyze billions of data sets from various sensors. However, AI uses algorithms and machine learning to evaluate the digital biomarkers and identify patterns in the data to draw conclusions and make predictions. In the output, the patients and healthcare professionals gain insights that help them in making evidence-based decisions.

This technological convergence, an integration of various technologies into new, advanced solutions, will further boost the evolution of digital biomarkers. Imagine smart implantables tracking the effectiveness of medicines so the doctors can remain up-to-date with the treatment progress or multimodal AI that can accumulate and analyze data from different, even non-interoperable, sources.

The future is filled with endless possibilities, yet the present already offers fascinating solutions.

Roche has the capacity to lead data-driven medicine 

For years, Roche has been expanding its portfolio with solutions based on digital biomarkers. These represent another milestone toward patient-centered, value-based, and personalized care, enabling individuals to monitor and manage their chronic diseases and motivating them to take control of their health.

The solutions based on digital biomarkers demonstrate Roche’s medical knowledge combined with cutting-edge technological expertise built upon partnerships, our ambitious ethical guidelines, compliance with recent and the most rigorous data security and privacy international legislation, along with data analytics/AI capabilities. 

I am confident that the rapid progress of wearables, improvements in digital health infrastructure, the growing capabilities of AI, and the research and development driven by our talented teams at Roche will soon trigger the next big breakthroughs in this field.

If you want to learn more about Roche’s solutions that can help healthcare providers introduce and scale innovations to personalize care and enhance the patient experience, please take a few minutes to visit Roche’s website.