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 th...
Source: The Medical Futurist - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Artificial Intelligence Health Sensors & Trackers Healthcare Policy Science Fiction Telemedicine & Smartphones digital health digital technology digital health strategy Source Type: blogs