COVID-19: The Great Digital Acceleration
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The session was an opportunity to reflect on the fact that digital tools have played a central role in mitigating some of the impacts of the COVID pandemic. It is shining a light on both the benefits and risks associated with digital technologies. It has accelerated digitally-driven transformations and fastened the migration of many parts of our lives to the digital world. This holds significant implications for our relationship to digital technologies both during the pandemic and for the recovery, as we strive to develop the “digital future we want”.
Validating the new health technologies and innovations in a post-pandemic world
The potential of telemedicine is well observed during the pandemic time as several consultations with doctors/health experts happened without going to the clinic or hospital. This was a positive sign and urges to look into new business models to help further telemedicine across the world. On this front, it is a time to encourage companies to come to the forefront with a wide range of tech-driven digital healthcare tools and products. It was predicted by the health industry experts that tele-health market across the world is likely to witness a massive spike both from the demand and supply sides. The service providers are assessing capacities and avenues, pursuing evidence-based innovations and technologies across the board, including diagnostic and telemedicine tools, cellphone apps for fitness, well-being, medical and healthcare, and data-driven software. But the argument is that maybe it is the pandemic which compelled to explore and extend these technologies to deal with the special and temporal gaps to access healthcare. The concern shall be to look into how these technologies and innovations will be used in a post-covid world to deal with public health issues. How in coming days, technologies and innovations will be integrated with public health response system for greater accessibility and affordability to health care services should be a priority area of research in public health studies. The pandemic has unraveled the myriad avenues and opportunities in boosting healthcare and life sciences in the world, it would be interesting to look into how health shall be observed as wealth in the post Covid world with technology and innovations as its greatest investment.
The challenge in a post-Covid world will be to validate the new technologies and innovations without assuming that they will work because they worked in an uncontrolled emergency situation during the pandemic. This requires new observations regarding the adoption and use of digital health tools and services to receive information and seek social and medical assistance and support in a post-covid world when again the people will have physical access to socio-economic infrastructure, facilities and services. The concern will be to look into how medium and low-income countries will refocus on preventive healthcare in a post-covid world with diverse and massive population, with disproportionate health infrastructure that often impacts medical responses to health emergency situations. When the world will regain its feet in post-covid realties, the challenge will be to recalibrate public health strategies with the help of emerging digital healthcare technologies to strengthen preventive healthcare. Investigations are required to explore the role of government in incentivizing and encouraging healthcare industries to deal with the issues of post-covid safety and care. The integration of health technologies and innovations into health policies and response strategies could be one of the concerned areas of research in post-covid world. The understanding of comprehensive responses of countries that have been successful to deal with covid through the timely and effective deployment of health technologies to facilitate planning, surveillance, testing, contact tracing, quarantine, and clinical management will help other countries to improve their health strategies and response systems.