Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic about two years ago, many facets of life have changed. Healthcare systems have seen many changes throughout the pandemic. We've seen hospitals overloaded with coronavirus patients struggle to keep up with the demand. The pandemic highlighted how inept our healthcare systems were in dealing with this type of crisis, while still providing care to existing patients. It also highlighted the inability to easily collect and analyze data on patients in an efficient matter, thus providing care to people more quickly.

Paddy Padmanabhan, founder and CEO of Damo Consulting Inc., is a digital health entrepreneur, author and host of The Big Unlock podcast. As someone who works in digital health and telehealth and advises large health systems on their digital transformation road maps, I am a true believer in the potential for remote and real-time virtual care modalities to transform healthcare. The Covid-19 pandemic made telehealth and remote care a necessity because of restrictions on in-person care. More recently, the growth in the virtual care and telehealth models is due to an acute shortage of workers at physical locations. In fact, according to the American College of Healthcare Executives' annual survey of top issues confronting hospitals, personnel shortages ranked as the top concern for hospital CEOs in 2021.

The market has been driving itself into a frenzy this past year with the potential for emerging technologies to influence the digital transformation of healthcare to a value-based care era. Every year, a new term becomes the buzzword around which the entire technology industry rallies to make its case and rise above the noise. This year, it's been AI, and technology vendors have fallen over one another to demonstrate how their solutions are "AI-powered," "AI-enabled" or "AI-led." The indiscriminate use of the term "AI" has become so pervasive that the research firm Gartner has even invented a name for it: AI-washing. Arguably, many technology solution providers in the digital health space are simply slapping an AI label onto their offerings in hopes that healthcare executives will be interested.

Successful patient engagement is a hallmark of success in the world of digital health. Thinking beyond the mobile app or wearable technology itself, Neura, a Silicon Valley-based company that was founded in 2013, has created a software platform that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to improve patient engagement for better health outcomes. By integrating with Neura's SDK, digital health technologies can dynamically key off of activity and lifestyle factors from the physical world around the user to contextualize the user experience for each individual. Today, Neura's platform is already being used to impact the $300B challenge of medication adherence. Medgadget had a chance to sit down with CEO and Co-Founder Gilad Meiri to learn more about Neura's platform and the company's vision for improving patient engagement.