Can your brand new COVID-19 access-to-care strategy take the load?

Strengthening the healthcare services infrastructure to deal with the medical implications of the COVID-19 pandemic is critical and each country implements their own strategy for this, depending on the particular features of their NHS and the health services consumption patterns and habits of the population.

The majority of such reactions concern the addition of primary points-of-care to the existing network infrastructure. But we should not forget points of care are also points of access to care, particularly so in the case of primary care. There are two major implications of this consideration. The additional generated referral traffic and maximising population coverage by streamlining access to care. Both are traditional digital health matters.

To ensure traffic due to new service provision channels and new healthcare processes is not backed up, both in terms of the access demand and referral demand the support will generate, a digital health strategy must exist and be well aligned with the infrastructural support response.   

Otherwise we shall encounter once again the familiar situations of backed-up access to care and referral chaos and non-compliance. These are problems that are well known to health authorities around the world and reiterating them now does not serve at all the time and money spent.

If you don’t have an interoperability platform for seamless information exchange among heterogeneous healthcare agents and their seamless collaboration build it now. Build a slice at least to address the upcoming COVID-19 bottleneck which in this case shall be created by the remedy and not the ailment.