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Digital Twin or Longitudinal Record? The Distinction Matters

The two terms get used interchangeably in healthcare marketing. They describe different things, with different evidentiary weight.

CAD CARE INSIGHTS  ·  PRECISION MEDICINE

The two terms get used interchangeably in healthcare marketing. They describe different things, with different evidentiary weight.

A longitudinal health record assembles what actually happened — encounters, results, prescriptions — across time and providers. It is a data structure, and its accuracy depends on capture quality.

A clinical digital twin implies a validated predictive model of an individual's physiology, typically requiring its own clinical validation studies before it can be relied on for a decision.

Describing a longitudinal record as a digital twin borrows credibility the underlying work has not earned yet. The honest description is also the more useful one, because it tells a clinician exactly how much to trust it.

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