According to several forecasts, 2020 has been an unforgiving but transformational year for our healthcare industry. The world has been struggling to cope up with the emergency created by the pandemic outbreak. Here the healthcare industry can expect a slight plateau in growth and expect the revenues to stay beneath the $2 trillion mark.
The demand for COVID testing and the emergency to find the vaccine has intensified. Here we found governments allocating funds to finance healthcare services and evaluating the viability of the mass vaccinations, immunity passports, and scaling up the contract tracing. As we advance, several IT giants are already betting big on the enterprise-grade AI platforms that forecast patient volume, predict pandemics, validate reimbursements and generate the well-being of an insured population via self-care enablement and medication management.
Highlights by Benjamin Gordon Palm Beach on How the Healthcare System is Responding to the Pandemic
The pandemic outbreak has highlighted that no healthcare system is an island. Today, each country has something to learn from and teach others. Here, weprovide three essential insights into how the healthcare systems are responding to the pandemic and getting more resilient.
The digital front door The pandemic has resulted in organizations and healthcare systems globally saying yes to online healthcare solutions. In most places, the online front door is now the only available front door for patients to access medical services. The general practitioner and hospital out-patient appointments globally have changed as the consultations are happening on a virtual platform. When the COVID-19 crisis reduces, one doesn’t see that online front door shutting down as the providers and patients have welcomed the flexibility and convenience of this kind of care. As people walk into the post-pandemic new reality, a significant concern for the healthcare system would be sustaining and scaling these online interactions.
- Cold and hot sites
As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, few countries have created cold and hot sites. The cold sites provide non-COVID care to reduce infection rate, function effectively without disturbing acute work, and generate elective procedures. Developing cold and hot sites will be essential to offer a new patient flow that got necessitated by the pandemic. There have been public-private partnerships in few countries to increase the public sector capacity.
- The aged care services
The elderly and aged populations are especially vulnerable to the virus. And monitoring the virus spread has been challenging for long-term care facilities globally. During the dark phase in this domain, a few places have made excellent efforts to secure the lives of aged people. However, the pandemic has shed light on the areas where there is a need for improvement. Conventionally, the aged care services didn’t get recognized as a part of the healthcare system. Today, several governments have identified this oversight and are taking apt actions. However, in a post-pandemic new reality, it is an ever-increasing and urgent need to efficiently incorporate and invest in aged care services along with the health systems.
At the onset of the pandemic, the healthcare industry was majorly impacted. As Benjamin Gordon Palm Beach says, today, there are many lessons to learn from this pandemic. The insights mentioned above will help the healthcare industry to perform better in any crisis.