How to recognize post-COVID care

Post COVID sickcare has emerged with many new facial features. The three most recognizable are 1) virtualization, 2) mass personalization, and 3) information and communications digitization. The dizzying pace of new products has gone from almost zero to hundred in 18 months.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed consumer behavior. Based on McKinsey surveys of US consumers, many spent the past year trying new brands and channels, adopting in-home alternatives to out-of-home activities, and shifting to online and omnichannel engagement. Many of the shifts could stick after the pandemic, potentially affecting the way that consumers approach healthcare. Consumers are reconsidering how they plan to address mental- and physical-health challenges, how they think about getting healthcare, how they will manage their care needs, and how they expect to do business with healthcare companies, according to McKinsey research based on multiple, nationally representative surveys of US consumers.

For patients, doctors and other stakeholders, the issues are :

1. Which virtual care company to use? Here's a list of 260 of them to get you started.
2. How should we identify which ones actually add value and which are snake oil.
3. How are we going to teach patients and doctors to use these technologies?
4. Who is going to pay for all this and how much will it cost? There is no Moore's Law in sickcare.
5. What will we do about cybersecurity?
6. How do we close the digital divide?
7. Will the trends transform sickcare into health care?
8. What will this mean for physician entrepreneurship?
9. How do we make all this interoperable?
10. What are the legal, regulatory, intellectual property and ethical issues and unintended consequences we have unleashed?
11. How do we reconcile the ethics of medicine with the ethics of BIG TECH?
12. Will precision/personalized medicine improve population health?

All of this high tech sickcare facial plastic surgery comes with unintended consequences, including the change from high touch to high tech to high no-trust medicine. But, at least with facial recognition software, we'll be able to recognize what's staring us in the face.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs