How Would Have COVID-19 Taken Place In A Digital Health Utopia?

What if the COVID-19 pandemic had been forecasted months in advance? And hospitals didn’t experience shortages thanks to the help of an A.I. helping administrators better manage their resources when facing such a virulent disease? What if telemedicine was the norm and unnecessary doctor-patient visits were eliminated, reducing transmission risks and helping with containing the virus faster and easier? What if patients could check if they’ve contracted the disease with at-home tests delivered via medical drones and self-isolate if they are positive?

If these scenarios sound too good to be true, it’s because they are. They depict how a pandemic at the scale of COVID-19 would play out in a digital health utopia: one where the cultural transformation that we at The Medical Futurist envision, one we wouldn’t mind being the reality.

Truth is, the technologies required for such a utopia already exist but aren’t implemented on a large scale. This can be attributed to insufficient policies and incentives to support them. However, digital health showed to be an adequate solution to handle the threat of COVID-19 right from the start. So let’s investigate how the COVID-19 saga would take place in this coveted digital health utopia; a utopia which we might need to be able to better handle a subsequent public health crisis.

A.I. saw a pandemic coming

What better aide to predict an upcoming disease outbreak than one that speaks the language of anticipation? Rather than leading to Judgment Day as predicted in Terminator, artificial intelligence is an indispensable tool in the healthcare setting in a digital health utopia. The technology can alert experts about an impending pandemic weeks and even months before it reaches a country. It does so by digesting tons of data from news reports, airline data, and animal disease outbreaks reports. This is done in a matter of minutes, which would take humans months to go through. Once the A.I. picks up a trend, epidemiologists analyze it and issue warnings for authorities to take prompt actions.

You might know it by heart now: it was an A. I. company, BlueDot, that helped epidemiologists send out the first warning of the COVID-19 outbreak; even before the WHO and CDC had done so. However, BlueDot’s example was the exception rather than the rule. Such an A.I. might not help identify patient zero and an outbreak which might inevitably ensue. However, forecasting allows healthcare institutions to better prepare and not to overwhelm themselves.

Source: www.iqvis.com

The latter can make further use of an A.I. integrated within the ideal healthcare system to assist each hospital in managing their supplies. This will prevent them from crumbling under pressure once the disease hits. Qvetus developed such an algorithm. Other researchers published their findings on an A.I. framework to assist in prioritizing resources for critical cases. However, we have yet to see it widely adopted; we’ve all read the news of hospitals worldwide struggling to keep both patients and medical staff safe with sufficient protective equipment.

If such cases of A.I. use are more widespread, authorities can take prompt action to contain the disease, well before it overwhelms them.

Healthcare and smartphone data without borders

In a digital health utopia, patient data and the myriad of security and privacy issues that it usually brings along are things of the past. That’s partly because a blockchain assures the security of these sensitive data; acting as a transparent shared book of records of sorts; employed in a similar way like the initiatives Estonia is taking to secure its health records.

Additionally, governments and public health authorities are transparent about the use of these sensitive data; effectively share proper information with citizens, curb fake news with the input from social media companies; and also pay heed to the advice of scientists when it comes to health crises.

The public is thus more open to providing anonymized movement data based on their smartphone activity. This will allow for faster contact tracing and makes it easier to follow the disease’s trail. Indeed, privacy-preserving ways to trace those potentially with COVID-19 are in the works. MIT, The University of Cambridge and another group of European universities have working prototypes. This allows citizens to contribute to a noble cause, without the lingering fear of an all-seeing Big Brother. The latter is a growing concern amidst the pandemic, with governments around the world using methods that expose the private lives and data of citizens.

Health tech at your doorstep

In this secure, interconnected paradise, people actively manage their health with digital health sensors and wearables. These keep them updated about their vitals in real-time. Should they show subtle signs of an infection without any overt symptoms, these devices can notify their physicians who can recommend subsequent actions. Integrating such data into medical records can further allow an A. I. to discern those who are at higher risk, based on their medical history and genomic data, and hospitalize them preemptively.

In line with turning the point-of-care towards the patient with the help of health sensors, patients can further perform readily available validated, at-home testing kits without the need to leave their homes. These kits, similar to the ones offered by telemedicine services PlushCare and Everlywell, are ordered online or issued by healthcare authorities and delivered via delivery drones. After taking a test sample, patients can send it back via the same method, without the need for human-to-human contact. Rwanda, or the real-life Wakanda, is already using drones to deliver supplies to hospitals; why not go a step further and get them directly to patients?

Such mass testing gives a clearer picture of the portion of the population that has contracted the virus; and who among them need medical attention. Early and mass testing is one of the reasons for Germany’s comparative successful management of COVID-19.

Telemedicine came from afar

Given that telemedicine is the normal way to provide consultations in the ideal digital health setting, as soon as authorities impose lockdowns or social distancing measures, nothing much fundamentally changes in the way people receive medical advice. Only when more thorough tests or closer attention are required should they use medical facilities.

Even within these facilities, technology helps in handling highly contagious viruses like SARS-CoV-2. Telemedical robots monitor patients, like the one used at the beginning of the outbreak in the U. S., equipped with screens to communicate and medical tools to monitor the vitals of the patient. Disinfecting robots take care of minimizing exposure to the staff; just like they disinfected hospital rooms in Wuhan.

Before the pandemic, only 1 in 10 U.S. patients used telemedicine services; but these saw a revival during these extraordinary circumstances. In the U.S., Amwell’s telemedicine app usage went up by 158% since January and appointments through PlushCare increased by 70%. In Denmark, the government and health IT vendors created a video-consultation app which saw 5,000 downloads within 15 minutes from its release. Since then, even more users adopted it.

We fiercely advocate for digital health here at The Medical Futurist. However, for the adoption of sci-fi-esque technologies on an international scale, digital health needs a real cultural transformation to take off. Rather than witnessing isolated use cases of technologies to support doctors and patients, their wide adoption as the norm is a must.

As depicted in this article, these will help better manage subsequent health crises; without overburdening stakeholders on every level of the healthcare landscape. As part of our mission to promote digital health, we will update you with a series of articles in a post-COVID world, analyzing the technologies that got into the COVID-spotlight.

Dr. Bertalan Mesko, PhD is The Medical Futurist and Director of The Medical Futurist Institute analyzing how science fiction technologies can become reality in medicine and healthcare. As a geek physician with a PhD in genomics, he is a keynote speaker and an Amazon Top 100 author.

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