E-Paper
From medical expertise to digital health fluency
This article is authored by Dr Rajendra Pratap Gupta, chairman, Academy of Digital Health Sciences.
Clinical excellence alone is no longer enough, and here is what you must do about it.
There is a quiet revolution unfolding in hospitals, clinics, and health ministries across the world. It does not arrive with fanfare. It arrives in the form of a new question being asked of every healthcare professional, not merely ‘What do you know clinically?’ but ‘How effectively do you function in a digital world?’ The answer is now reshaping what it means to be competent, relevant, and indispensable in global health care.
Over 120 countries have a formal national digital health strategy. India’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission has registered over 840 million health accounts, the world’s largest interoperable health ID ecosystem. Telehealth utilisation in the US is now 38 times higher than before Covid-19. Electronic Health Records are the default, not the exception, across OECD nations.
And yet, fewer than 40% of clinicians report feeling confident using digital health tools. The infrastructure has raced ahead. The human capital has not kept pace.
Almost all the conversation in medicine today is about Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is one instrument in a very large orchestra. Digital health is a vast ecosystem encompassing telemedicine, health data analytics, AR, VR, MR, gaming, the Internet of Medical Things, cybersecurity, interoperability standards, and a lot more. While most clinicians are just hovering around AI, this is the biggest mistake. They need to understand the digital health ecosystem.
The dominant anxiety is that AI will replace doctors. This misidentifies the actual threat. The physicians most at risk are those who cannot function effectively in digitally integrated care environments, who cannot read a dashboard, who avoid telemedicine platforms, who are absent from governance conversations. The question is not whether AI will replace doctors. The question is whether digitally fluent doctors will replace those who are not. The digital ecosystem will be much more fluent in leveraging clinical knowledge than a clinician in the next three years.
There is a temptation to solve this by embedding digital health into undergraduate medical education. It is the wrong instinct, and here is why. In India, recently, even NBE started the course in AI; this is where ‘trending topics’ take over the regulators. Time for NBE and NMC to be in digital health and not just AI alone but as CPD and not just thrusted in the UG/PG.
Digital health tools do not evolve on a five-year curriculum cycle. They evolve every few weeks. The platforms, standards, regulations, and devices that a medical student learns in Year 1 may be obsolete by graduation. Locking digital health into a fixed curriculum risks producing graduates fluent in yesterday’s technology, with false confidence and outdated skills.
Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is the right architecture for digital health education precisely because it is dynamic, modular, and lifelong. It allows clinicians to update their digital competencies as tools evolve, not once at the start of a career, but continuously throughout it. A practising physician today needs to understand the digital health landscape of today, not a snapshot preserved in a textbook from three years ago.
This is why formal digital health certification through CPD frameworks, not compulsory undergraduate modules, is the model that health systems and professional bodies should prioritise. Institutions such as the Academy of Digital Health Sciences are building rigorous, accessible certification pathways designed for working clinicians, updated to reflect the current state of the field, and structured to grow with the learner’s career.
Digital fluency is not a replacement for clinical training. It is what allows clinical expertise to be fully expressed in the environments where healthcare is now practiced. Medical competence without digital fluency artificially constrains a brilliant mind. Digital fluency without medical competence produces systems that optimise for the wrong outcomes. The combination is what the world’s health care systems urgently need.
Health care professionals who develop digital fluency now, through structured CPD, through engagement with the full landscape of digital health, and through active participation in governance conversations, will shape the medicine of the next quarter century. Those who do not will find that decisions affecting their patients and their profession have been made by technologists and administrators who lacked the clinical wisdom to make them well.
Medical excellence is non-negotiable. Digital health fluency is now non-optional. The future of health care belongs to those who hold both.
(The views expressed are personal.)
This article is authored by Dr Rajendra Pratap Gupta, chairman, Academy of Digital Health Sciences.
