Digital trails, data collections of individuals' traceable digital activities online or on digital devices, have been utilized by many industries to provide valuable insights to enhance customer experience, improve operation efficiency, and increase revenues. Despite the abundance of digital trails among health care data, health care has lagged behind other industries in extracting their values. Recently, telehealth's accelerated adoption due to the COVID-19 pandemic provides an unprecedented opportunity for health care providers to take advantage of digital trails. In this study, we describe digital trails generated from the telehealth workflow and discuss a few use cases to demonstrate how telehealth digital trails can be used to improve clinical service quality, streamline patient care workflow, and enhance the patient experience.
Keywords: digital exhaust; digital trail; patient satisfaction; quality improvement; telehealth; telemedicine.