Digital twins in healthcare: Addressing concerns and meeting professional needs

Digital twin is the virtual representation of a physical system that processes information from its physical counterpart?s environment, used to predict, simulate, and validate the physical system?s future behaviour. Digital twin system, being an emergent technology, has seen implementations in a wide array of industries such as smart cities, engineering, etc. In healthcare, the digital twin technology shows great promise to improve various areas such as patient care, virtualization of hospital spaces, etc. There are concerns regarding patient data confidentiality, patient safety, accuracy and reliability, avoidance of bias, etc. These concerns can be combated only through thorough feedback from system experts, i.e., healthcare professionals. This chapter aims to provide valuable insights into the different needs of healthcare professionals while implementing digital twin systems in aiding diagnosis, treatment planning, patient monitoring, and collaboration among different specialty teams all while dealing with concerns regarding patient data security and sampling bias.