Digital Health for Primary Care

This book provides a comprehensive exploration of the role of Digital Health technologies in Primary Care. Discussing the transformative potential of Digital Health solutions and their impact on healthcare delivery within the Primary Care setting, the book offers insights, considers strategies, and shares practical guidance for all Primary Care providers interested in leveraging digital innovations to enhance patient outcomes and optimise care delivery.

Key Features:

- Content specific to and tailored for primary care and family medicine
- Provides expert opinion and thought leadership on key enablers and hindrances of digital technology within health care systems
- Includes concepts of patient and provider co-design of ideal systems and real-world examples of successful integrations of technologies into patient-centred models of care
- Delivers the essential knowledge for practitioners and policy makers to develop and implement digital health innovation and service redesign

Through structured description of the spectrum of existing digital innovations, all applicable within and relevant to Primary Care, this timely new guide will support clinicians, innovators, and policy makers to maximise the opportunities and challenges that these technologies present. This guide will also enable future doctors, whatever their career aspirations, to understand the importance of digital innovation and its applications in health systems and patient-centred care.

About the Editors:

Ana Luisa Neves MD PhD, Clinical Senior Lecturer in Digital Health, Department of Primary Care and Public Health, Imperial College, London, UK; Chair of the WONCA Working Party on eHealth

Liliana Laranjo MD MPH PhD, Associate Professor, Westmead Applied Research Centre, Sydney Medical School, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney, Australia; Deputy Chair of the WONCA Working Party on eHealth.

Ana Luisa Neves is a Clinical Senior Lecturer in Digital Health and Director of the Global Digital Health Unit at Imperial College, where she leads a team of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, focusing on the use of digital technologies to deliver safer, more effective, and patient-centred care. She has more than 15 years of research experience, and >80 papers published in peer-reviewed journals (>4,800 citations, h-index=31), using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Dr Neves is currently an elected member of the Executive Board of the European General Practice Research Network and Chair of the Working Party on eHealth of WONCA World.

Prior to joining Imperial College, Dr Neves earned her medical degree from the University of Porto in Portugal, where she also completed her specialist training in General Practice in 2013. She has practiced as a General Practitioner in Portugal and the United Kingdom, and has volunteered in low-income countries, focusing on patient education programs related to women’s health and infectious diseases in Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, and Mozambique. During her General Practice residency, she undertook academic and research placements at Institut National de la Santé et Recherche Médicale in Paris and at Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School affiliate in Boston. In 2014, Dr. Neves moved to London to pursue a Ph.D. in Clinical Medicine at Imperial College London, which she completed in 2018. In 2018, she was awarded a scholarship from the European Association of General Practice (WONCA Europe). Beyond her roles at Imperial College, Dr. Neves currently serves as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Ariadne Labs, where she was named the Home Hospital International Fellow in 2024. She also holds a position as Associate Professor at the University of Porto.

Liliana Laranjo (MD, MPH, PhD) is an Associate Professor at Sydney Medical School, University of Sydney, where she holds a Sydney Horizon Fellowship. She has a background as a General Practitioner and is Deputy Chair of the World Organization of General Practitioners’ (WONCA) eHealth Working Party, as well as Member of the founding International Advisory Board for The Lancet Primary Care. Dr Laranjo leads the Digital Health Stream at the Westmead Applied Research Centre, an Impact Centre of the University of Sydney, where she coordinates several clinical trials and leads multidisciplinary teams across different fields, from medicine and health to data science and engineering. Her research focuses on leveraging digital health to empower and support patients in their health journeys, with the aim of preventing chronic disease at scale in the community.

Dr Laranjo has a Master of Public Health from Harvard University and a PhD in Medicine (Digital Health) from Lisbon Medical School, Portugal. During her PhD, she received a Junior Clinical Research Award from the Harvard Medical School-Portugal Program. She was a 2022 World Heart Federation Emerging Leader and has been awarded a National Health and Medical Research Council Emerging Leader Investigator Grant (2023-2027) and an Honorary Future Leader Fellowship from the National Heart Foundation (2023-2026) in Australia. Dr Laranjo’s work has received global media attention and has been used to guide research, practice and policy worldwide. Her field-weighted citation index is 2, meaning her overall number of citations is double the world average in the field.