COVID-19 Lessons & Quick wins for the “Here & Now”

On the last article, “Let's build the Future of Healthcare together”, we went into the reasons why I believe we need to start building the future of healthcare now and why my purpose is “change the way healthcare is delivered”. With that we can now start focusing on what are the steps to get there, and there are for sure many, since “Building the Future of Healthcare” is a multi-step approach and requires us to overcome several hurdles, as Fay Niewiadomski commented very well on my first article. These hurdles are related to Education, Politics, Finances, Business Strategy, Medical Practices, Regulatory & Compliance, Governance, and Technology, just to name a few.

To achieve this, in an understandable and connected way, we created this bi-weekly newsletter focusing on a step-by-step view of where we are and what we need to achieve the Future of Healthcare.

In this article, we will focus on the “here & now” and what we could do today to provide quick wins which would massively improve overall population health and at the same time reduce the pressure all healthcare professionals are facing daily.

What did COVID-19 pandemic show us in terms of healthcare pressures?

The COVID-19 pandemic really showed how stretched our healthcare system is today, from a:

People perspective, we saw first-hand the amazing work our healthcare professionals do every day, saw the lack of healthcare professionals the health system has today, how stressed and underpaid the existing ones truly were, we saw them giving everything they could & more by being months apart from their families and working non-stop to save lives, while at the same time they tried to find ways to cure people and “fight” disinformation and misinformation.

Process perspective, we saw that healthcare systems around the world were not ready to respond to emergencies. What we saw was the response (backlog prioritisation, capacity increases, etc.) coming in phases. This clearly shows that there are “gaps” on the “Business Continuity Management & Operational Resiliency” process of the healthcare system itself, as it did not seem that a clear set of policies and procedures were established, documented, communicated, applied, maintained, and assessed regularly. If they were this would not have had such an impact in the overall society.

Resources perspective, we saw that hospitals and other care settings completely overwhelmed by the volume of people, but also because they were almost at capacity even before the pandemic. We also saw how quickly people were able to readjust the processes to make new hospitals and gather more stock to help people, but in many cases being frustrated by the lack of healthcare professionals.

Partnerships perspective, we saw healthcare providers partnering with clinical research organisations (CRO’s), technology companies, pharmaceutical companies and so on, and research, trial and deliver the fastest ever vaccination program which we have ever seen. What this means is that we saw the power of “focused partnerships” as when there was a common purpose and mutual benefits all people and companies went above & beyond to deliver results.

This is a quick analysis on what COVID-19 showed us in terms of healthcare pressures, but we should also remember what positives it showed us too. We saw healthcare professionals giving above & beyond what we thought was possible, we saw volunteers gather around a common purpose and deliver testing, vaccination and helping healthcare professionals every day. Let us make sure we keep this same focus and support moving forward too.

For more detailed lessons learned you can check the WHO paper named “Response to the COVID-19 pandemic: lessons learned to date from the WHO European Region”.

Quick wins for the “Here & Now”

With these lessons in mind, we should continue to thrive to improve our healthcare system every day, and as the pandemic showed us, creating partnerships and a common purpose is critical to achieve quick success.

As the COVID pandemic “seems” to slow down, we see the focus moving into resolving the massive backlog, which was created over these 2 years, but we cannot forget that the same pressures still exist.

Due to my healthcare passion, and while reading a news article focused on how the lack of hospital beds and nurses was impacting the speed in which the healthcare backlog could be cleared, I started thinking on innovative ways we could pair different healthcare offerings which exist today to solve these 2 issues, the same way we did for the creation of vaccines. This is what my thought process was and what, from my perspective, we could do to help:

Today, one of the reasons why there is a challenge with the number of hospital beds available is because independently of the complexity of the treatment of surgery, there is always a recovery process in which the person requires close surveillance. This normally is delivered by a multi-disciplinary teams of healthcare professionals which need to have a constant stream of data about the person. This can span from blood tests, heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation levels, and others, which require medical devices, lab expertise and medical surveillance.

With that in mind, would it be possible to improve this by leveraging digital technologies which exist today? Could mimic what is done at an hospital but do the recovery in the person’s home, in the cases which made sense?

After lots of research and hypothesis testing, my view is that we could create the concept of “Virtual Recovery Ward” for hospitals to use. A “Virtual Recovery Ward” would need to have all the elements we described above, from medical devices to lab expertise and medical surveillance. All these exist today but are being delivered individually by different healthcare companies, which means we need to join them together through partnerships, just like during the COVID pandemic, to achieve the best and fastest result. This means we need to bring together the following:

Medical Devices – we could have medical devices companies delivering connected medical devices at the person’s home to enable full monitoring of their health even when they are at home. (E.g. Omron, Medtronic, etc)

Lab Testing – we could have companies like Thriva or InsideTracker, delivering Blood Testing kits to the person’s home allowing lab expertise to be delivered even from the comfort of the person’s home.

Medical Surveillance – we could have companies like Babylon or Medcase, provide medical professionals from doctors to nurses, to ensure the constant medical surveillance of the person even at home.

Virtual Recovery Ward dashboard – Any Healthcare IT company, or a Medical Surveillance company or even the Healthcare System through their technology arm (e.g., NHS Digital), could quickly develop a dashboard to show all this data to allow the medical surveillance. This already exists in pieces and would mostly be an integration work.

This could then be applied to all Hospitals & Clinics as a way to expand beyond their physical limits, as each hospital could have their own “Virtual Recovery Ward”, and in the future a full “Digital Ward” but that is a topic to discuss in the future.

What immediate challenges would this solve?

-???????Bed availability would increase exponentially, as with the advances in connected medical devices, the number of people which could recover in their homes with the same level of monitoring as in the hospital would increase, thus reducing existing pressures on bed availability, and ?in turn would allow them to be used for surge situations which is when they are truly needed. In addition, this would also enable a faster delivery of care for people when they need it, reducing the overall backlogs and waiting times, while at the same time would help reducing the overall cost of delivering care.

-???????Availability of healthcare professionals, since with the support of Medical Surveillance & Medical Expertise companies we would be able to have more healthcare professionals whenever we need to support any surge situation.

Why sharing this instead of creating a company to build this?

You might wonder why would I share this, and other ideas, instead of creating a company around them?

The answer for me is simple, changing something this complex for the better isn’t something anyone can do by themselves, as this takes a lot of time, effort, expertise and collaboration in different areas of knowledge, and if I decided to create a company to solve the whole thing it would certainly take time and, success isn’t always guaranteed for multiple reasons. Having this in mind I have decided to share these ideas, since by sharing them I will be increasing the probability of being seeing them be created, which will ultimately help everyone and achieve the Future of Healthcare faster. It also allows me to find like-minded people who want to join this journey of “Building the future of Healthcare”.

Did this interest you? Want to join this journey or just have a conversation? Do you have some ideas you would like to share? Just add your comments and reach out to me for a conversation. Only together we will make the Future of Healthcare a reality.