Digital health tech has the potential to help us all live longer, healthier lives – but it isn’t a population health silver bullet, it’s just one tool in the sector’s wide and diverse armoury.

When the government published its prevention green paper earlier this year, it placed a heavy emphasis on emerging technologies such as genetic sequencing, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

Advancing our Health: Prevention in the 2020s said we are about to enter a decade of “proactive, predictive, personalised prevention” which would provide targeted support, tailored lifestyle advice and greater protection against future threats.

Painting a picture of the digital health future, it said: “New technologies such as genomics and AI will help us create a new prevention model that means the NHS will be there for people even before they are born.

“Using data held by the NHS, and generated by smart devices worn by individuals, we will be able to usher in a new wave of intelligent public health where everyone has access to their health information and many more health interventions are personalised.”

In the 2020s, the green paper envisions, digital health will enable people to convert from “passive recipients of care”, rather “co-creators of their own health”.

It’s a laudable and in many ways feasible aim. We are, after all, in the midst of a technological revolution that is transforming everything from diagnostics to follow-up care.

But tacking embedded public health issues such as obesity and diabetes, health inequalities and the stall in life expectancy will require more than a reliance on the potential of technology. We need a whole-system approach that moves beyond the personal.

Technological aide

Last week, the Health Foundation published a report setting out the main challenges that health leaders will need to overcome if the government’s vision of a healthy future can become a reality.

“The hope… is that new, ‘smarter’ approaches to prevention will help address entrenched problems, such as health inequalities, and worrying trends, such as the stalled improvements in life expectancy,” said the authors.

“However, if real progress is going to be made in improving the public’s health, history tells us that some fundamental tensions in public health policy and practice need to be addressed.”

In short, technology and its potential needs to be seen in the round, as an adjunct to, not replacement for, the expertise and evidence we already have.

Challenging health inequalities 

Firstly, the foundation claims that there needs to be a greater balance between interventions that reduce individual susceptibility and those that address the society-wide underlying causes of ill health.

“There are good reasons – both theoretical and empirical – to believe that, while both approaches are needed, those that address the underlying causes have the biggest