The COVID-19 pandemic seems to have affected every major industry throughout the globe, and even the healthtech domain is not safe from it. Although, the industry seems to have adopted digital transformation to respond to the endemic effects.
Numerous healthcare ventures have bit the dust to the COVID-19 spread, and authorities throughout the world are implementing health measures to tackle the situation.
However, social distancing and lockdown won’t help the market grow. Moreover, safety guidelines cannot be adopted by people in the healthcare industry.
Therefore the questions arise, “How can we deal with the pandemic and take care of the safety of participants?” The hope of a vaccine is always on the horizen, but what to do till then? The healthcare industry seems to have found some handy measures through technology.
How can Healthtech help during COVID-19 Crisis?
The standard healthcare practices were bound to be dismantled, and Coronavirus acted as the stimulus for the same. The pandemic has pushed the industry to formulate new strategies and evolve their proceedings to keep everything intact.
Technology has aided in bridging the communication gap within the industry, leading to better patient satisfaction and care.
The Tech Perspective
Several healthtech trends have picked up pace due to the worldwide digital evolution to identify, design, and compute helpful healthtech solutions. Only these measures can help the industry to cope with issues like COVID-10, now and in the future.
These measures include,
- IoT (Internet of Things)
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Conversational AI
- Blockchain
- Analytics
- Big Data
- Cloud Computing
- Extended Reality
- Wearable Tech
- Digital Twins
Such trends are evolving, and with 5G on the way, tech like ML, AI, and IoT will undoubtedly proliferate. ML and AI can aid every healthcare provider to use the advantages of data-driven results, whether it is researching, identifying patients, overviewing the crisis, or creating a viable vaccine.
Moreover, tech like robotics can handle the frontline to handle patients in situations requiring utmost safety. The rise of medical robotics is about to dawn on us, which will surely revolutionize the industry. The healthcare industry has already funded hefty amounts to develop medical robotics, so much so that the global value of the market is expected to reach 20 billion dollars.
With social distancing being the sole viable solution at our disposal, tech like VR and AR are working wonders for the industry. Such tech can be leveraged to aid in training the workers, offering product knowledge, and providing medical assistance over distance. Even the VR/AR technology is speculated to rise to 5.1 billion dollars by 2025.
These technologies can be integrated within the healthcare industry to open new prospects for everyone.
The Solution Perspective
Now that it has been established that digital evolution might be the key to end issues like coronavirus, it is time to see the solution perspective.
Naming the current era digital won’t be a stretch as the world has over 3 billion daily smartphone users. Additionally, countless people use smartwear to keep their health in check. These stats have certainly helped the healthcare industry to devise intuitive healthcare frameworks to solve the issues posed by COVID-19.
On-Demand Online care
Providing healthcare services digitally is ideal when a patient should not leave their premises. With the tech, you can instantly interact with patients, doctors, and use healthcare services.
Telehealth
Telemedicine is yet another viable approach to deliver effective patient care. The approach can help you avoid personal interaction, which is a must under current circumstances.
With the rise of services like cloud and IoT in the healthcare industry, the emergence of a shared healthcare ecosystem is here. With IoT, healthcare companies can facilitate M2M (machine-to-machine) communication for gaining real-time access to data while driving data-based results.
The cloud is also helping business incorporation via aiding companies to shift their standard systems over the cloud. Through this, they can build SaaS products to facilitate everything online. Services like Application Programming Interface (APIs) are helping establish Business-to-Business (B2B) communications for ensuring total compliance with the industry standards.
Every development is a step towards a shared healthcare ecosystem and a continuous flow of patient monitoring and information sharing via digital means.
To Wrap Up
With the world haunted by COVID-19 Crisis, digital evolution seems to be the only way out. The approach can facilitate inherent benefits like social distancing while also reducing the proceedings’ costs in delivering better healthcare services. Some reports have mentioned that ML and AI can aid the healthcare market to save over 100 billion dollars annually.
Digital evolution and advanced tech can enhance the healthcare industry from its core. With this, they can cope with current adversaries like COVID-19 and also prepare for any upcoming threat. The augmentation of digital solutions will certainly create smooth patient care, easy information sharing, and seamless industry interaction.