Future of #Healthcare fuelled by #Digital

Let us assess the famous quote ' There is O of opportunity in every prOblem' in the context of current Covid-19 pandemic. We are all aware of the vast destruction covid-19 pandemic has brought in, so I am not going to re-iterate it here. Instead, the focus here will be on O part, i.e. the Opportunity to improve healthcare system with the help of tech, to better prepare and handle any such situation presently and in in future. Lets discuss the faint signals emerging in various aspects of healthcare delivery, which are capable of changing the future healthcare ecosystem:

1. Virtual Consultation: Pre-covid, there was an unstated mandate to visit the medical practitioners in their clinics or hospitals. Patients as well as expert practitioners were not comfortable virtual. Last fifteen months have changed this radically. Now, the entire interaction cycle, from expert identification, appointment booking, reports sharing and analysis, expert consultation, payment, followup etc. everything has moved to virtual platform(s). Yes, most of them are using multiple platforms for most of these tasks, which in future is likely to move to a focused system. #Virtual-consultation can led to increased levels of medical practitioners' accessibility to wider geography. To further strengthen virtual consultation model, a #blockchain based unified #healthtech platform with integrated systems to record patient history, vitals, consultation, treatment, hospitalisation history etc. needs to be created.
2. #Hybrid healthcare delivery: With the acute shortage of beds in hospitals at the peak of first wave and then during the second wave, many institutions and clinics ramped up to provide healthcare services to mild-to-moderate cases in the comfort of patients' homes. This accelerated ramp up has increased the patient handling capacity of institutions without being dependent on physical resources and space to do so. If this model continues then hospitals can save a substantial cost of 'expensive' real estate to increase the number of serviceable beds. This model can be implemented with AI-based solutions to listen to patients' instructions, remind for medicine dose, enable #tele-consulting, detect patient movement on #smartbeds, and portable monitoring kits. Along with building massive hospital infrastructure, sizeable investment in building hybrid delivery model needs to be done. This helps in ramping up effortlessly in the time of need, instead of choking the limited resources.
3. #IoT for In-Patient Care: The smart #healthtech, which is used for everyday activity, can make its way into patient care. In fact, it has started. Still at its nascent stage, devices to record patient movements, actions, reactions, expressions are getting used for diagnosis and prognosis. These signals are analysed by ML algorithms for further refinement of future line of treatment. Widespread availability and adoption of such smart sensors can bring down the TCO. Such solution cannot work in silos, it requires a unified platform connecting the IoT devices and ML algorithm to analyse large scale data inputs.
4. Flexible ICU Infrastructure: The second wave saw rapid penetration of 'medical only devices' into common households. Due to overloaded healthcare systems, many people setup ventilator beds in their homes or in some nursing homes, or setup oxygen plants in very small clinics and hospitals. Saving life was the need of the hour. Continuing this line of thought, technology to quickly convert ordinary bed to ICU bed in hospitals/nursing homes/clinics can increase contingency handling capability.

Instead of fixed infrastructure, platform based on-demand expandability can help us cover larger population base. The healthcare setup, fuelled by right technology, can enable a better response to any epidemic or even pandemic outbreak. Virtual consulting takes care of increased availability of medical expertise, hybrid delivery removes constraint of bed availability, IoT based in-patient care manages better and effective treatment for patients in the hospitals and #flexible #ICU infrastructure can handle critical cases more effectively. The healthcare system advancements using #blockchain, #AI, #ML, #IoT are essential to enable medical practitioners to manage patients well during crisis.