Early patient involvement leads to better health outcomes: A patient-centric approach to digital health innovation

Patient-centricity is often seen as a matter of ethics, something that “should” be done on principle. Our white paper demonstrates that patient-centricity is not just an ethical imperative, but strategically essential for digital health solutions to build sustainable businesses whilst transforming lives. All too often, patient involvement happens only at the very last stage of technology development—during clinical validation—and delayed involvement of patients frequently leads to costly redesigns and poor adoption when solutions miss the mark on what patients truly need.

In a new white paper that advocates the need to put patients at the centre of digital health innovation to achieve real world impact, a practical evaluation framework is provided for healthcare professionals and organisations to identify and address current gaps. The framework is developed by the Institute for Digital Medicine (WisDM) at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine), in collaboration with PwC Singapore.

Using digital therapeutics (DTx) as a key use case, the white paper shows that solutions designed with patient input from the very beginning are more likely to succeed, improve health outcomes, and deliver better experiences for everyone involved.  When patients become partners from day one and help to shape, test, and continually refine digital health tools, organisations avoid these pitfalls and build solutions that work effectively in people's lives. Patient needs, experiences, and outcomes become the north star for development decisions and investment priorities – a paradigm shift from the current ethos in which technology capabilities drive innovation, not patients.

To help organisations and healthcare teams put these ideas into practice, the white paper introduces a practical evaluation tool. With this framework, anyone in healthcare—be it investors, hospitals, or technology developers—can easily assess how patient-centric their current solutions really are. The tool guides users in spotting specific gaps in patient-centricity and highlights practical steps to address them, so that every stakeholder has clear, actionable steps to become more patient-centric.

Key findings from the white paper include:

• Early and ongoing patient involvement leads to better clinical outcomes, higher patient engagement, better retention in care, and stronger real-world evidence that digital health innovations improve patient lives.
• Patient-centric approaches potentially lower healthcare costs for users and patients. When patients are involved early, developers save on downstream development and redesign costs.
• Shifting from a “build it and they will come” mindset to “build what patients actually need” creates more sustainable and scalable solutions that achieve both commercial success and meaningful health impact.

Professor Dean Ho, Director of WisDM, who co-led the paper, said, “Looking ahead, we will  collaborate with industry partners to define new best practices—from participatory health design in human trials to real-world evidence—so that others across the healthspan and healthcare ecosystem can benefit and accelerate this shift toward truly patient-driven innovation. We hope that in the future, involving patients as co-creators will become foundational for every organisation, public or private.”