The document discusses how change streams in MongoDB can be used to keep application data in real-time by watching for changes to documents in a collection. Change streams provide a defined API and enable scaling across nodes while ensuring total ordering of changes. They allow applications to populate an initial cache of documents and then receive notifications of inserts, updates, replaces, deletes, and invalidates in order to maintain an up-to-date cache. The document provides examples of filtering change streams and handling different operation types.