Abstract:
Multimorbidity among older adults has become a routine challenge for chronic disease management within China’s primary care system. Conventional disease-specific models of care are poorly suited to the complex needs of this population, potentially leading to fragmented care, increased medication burden, and limited patient engagement. Digital health offers a means of supporting integrated clinical decision-making, strengthening continuity of care, and allocating limited healthcare resources according to patient risk and need. This narrative review examines digital health applications in risk stratification, continuous remote care, self-management support, and medication optimization. Available evidence suggests that digital health technologies can facilitate the identification of high-risk populations, improve selected measures of disease control, support patient self-management, and optimize prescribing processes, but their effects on functional status, quality of life, hospitalization, and mortality remain inconsistent. Despite its potential, wider implementation of digital health is hindered by fragmented data, limited model generalizability and applicability, barriers to access and sustained use, poor workflow integration, and insufficient evidence on effectiveness, implementation strategies, and economic value. Concerns about privacy, security, equity, and accountability also remain unresolved. Future efforts should therefore be anchored around patients’ overall health goals. Priorities include strengthening data infrastructure and model applicability, developing integrated services that impose minimal burden on older adults, optimizing primary care workflows and coordination, and establishing robust governance mechanisms for privacy, security, and accountability. Together, these efforts could support a more standardized, efficient, and sustainable approach to digital health–empowered primary care management for older adults with multimorbidity.