2020 has been a devastating year of millions around the world both on professional and personal fronts. The impact of loss of jobs, lives and our social life will be felt till many years to come. It has impacted all countries, sectors, industries, societies and every aspect of our lives. Needless to say, it has completely transformed the healthcare industry as well. Hospitals have been overwhelmed all through the year; Doctors and nurses have seen multiple patients dying everyday in front of their eyes; Healthcare professionals have made several sacrifices on the personal front to perform their duties(I was watching the news on Christmas night and hearing stories of medical professionals who have not met their families for months) and yet they could not prevent loss of lives in several thousand cases. We all hear and see these developments everyday and a lot has already been written on this. However, as they say there is another side of every coin. There have been some noticeable positive impacts also of Covid-19 on the healthcare industry. I am enumerating the top 10 positive impacts of COVID-19 in the following paragraphs.
1. Primary Care
For all of us living in USA and other rich countries, our primary care doctor has always been our first point of contact whenever we think of availing healthcare services. We feel the need of healthcare, we call the hospital, book an appointment and visit our primary care doctor. But did we ever feel that hospital visits might not be required in most of the cases? We can very well do that online. COVID -19 taught us that. A study has suggested that before COVID -19, 80% of the appointments were face to face. Now they are less than 30%. It is expected to go down further even when the pandemic subsides. This not only helps to free up hospital resources; it saves lot of patients’ waiting time and makes care available without going through the complex traditional hospital system. It will also foster a new wave of growth in health apps, primary care recommendations and pure online care management.
2. Home Monitoring of patients
Although several small/mid/large size companies have been introducing products to be used in remote monitoring of patients for some time now, the real acceptance of this area has been seen in this pandemic. As hospitals got overwhelmed, lot of COVID and Non-COVID patients were sent back home and clinicians world over adopted different methods to monitor the health of their patients through telehealth and other home monitoring technologies. For example, major hospitals in USA, such as University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio, Providence St. Joseph Health in Renton, Washington, Mount Sinai Health System in New York City started programs during the COVID -19 pandemic to monitor vital signs and symptom data and status of coronavirus patients. Some others are taking it a step further. For Example, Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, is working to set-up remote monitoring programs for patients with congestive heart failure. FDA has issued a new policy allowing certain devices to be used in remote settings. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services expanded Medicare coverage for remote patient monitoring. All these developments are expected to continue in the coming years to come.
3. Quicker Regulatory Approvals
In Dec 2020, FDA approved 2 vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna for COVID-19. Both companies took around 11 months to develop and get their vaccines approved. For people who have been waiting for these vaccines to be available in the market, 11 months may seem a lot. But for people like us in the healthcare industry, 11 months for a vaccine approval is nothing. Just look at some of the cases in the past. The Hepatitis B vaccine took 12 years, the combined Measles, Mumps and Rubella(MMR) took around 10 years to develop, Chickenpox vaccine took 25 years to hit USA in 1995 after being first introduced in Japan in 1971 and HIV vaccine took around 20 years to hit the market once doctors deciphered the link between HPV and Cervical cancer in 1981.
The speed at which FDA and world’s regulatory systems have moved in the case of COVID-19 vaccines has been one of the most positive outcomes of this whole pandemic. A typical vaccine development goes through multiple phases and the whole process can take years. Traditionally, BLAs are submitted at the end of phase 3 trial along with data of each trails. However, FDA implemented a system of the rolling reviews of the trials. Instead of waiting for firms to collate and submit all the data in one go, regulatory agencies kept studying the data as and when they became available. This will have lasting effect on the whole approval industry and our ability to respond to any crisis going in the future will be greatly enhanced because of all these learnings in handling the coronavirus thing.
4. Focus on prevention rather than on cure
One of the major goals of public health administrators in handling this whole pandemic was to stop the spread of the diseases. It brought back the focus on prevention rather than on cure. Issues of hygiene, safe disposal, avoiding unnecessary contacts, limiting social movements when ill and several other points came into prominence. Remote monitoring of patients also got prominence as described above. Through the use of several technologies, it will be possible to prevent multiple ailments before they become serious.
5. Different parts of health systems coming together
COVID -19 crisis forced different parts of healthcare system come together to handle this never-seen-before crisis. Across the industry workforce, equipment, ideas, best practices, new findings on treating COVID-19 patients were shared globally and brought together people who had never interacted in the past. As an example, Clinical information resources for COVID 19 were assembled by nurses and other clinicians handling health informatics challenges related to COVID19. Among those resources were podcast interviews with nursing informatics leaders from across the nation who shared insights about their work in dealing with the pandemic. Doctors across the world shared their experiences with one another to how to best treat the COVID -19 pandemic. This was a collaboration as a scale that world had never seen.
6. Interoperability
Around 80-90% of hospitals and individual practices in USA use some form of Electronic Health Records systems for maintaining health related data of their patients. However, they have been notoriously reluctant to share their data outside of their own networks mainly because of the fear of losing their patient to other providers. The situation is even worse in developing economies where adoption of EMR itself is very less. However, COVID 19 has changed all this. Now people are opening talking about interoperability and sharing data across providers. In April of this year, Epic dropped its opposition to sharing its EMR with patients. In January Apple and Microsoft called for bringing interoperability rules in the market. In October 2020, apple made the EMR data available on its app in UK and Canada.
All these steps are in the right direction. By implementing proper interoperability rules and enabling sharing of data among different stakeholders, all the parties will benefit. Although the trend had started before COVID, but COVID-19 provide the required impetus to these efforts and clearly one of the major positive outcomes of this pandemic.
7. Entry of tech giants into healthcare market
The previous attempts by Tech Giants into the healthcare industry have either mostly been failures or had limited success. Google started offering a platform for maintaining individual EMR data almost a decade ago, but if did not go anywhere. IBM’s attempt to apply its Watson question-and-answer system to cure cancer never scaled up and did not get any traction.
The COVID has given new hopes to the big 4 – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Healthcare. During this pandemic, all 4 have increased their efforts to crack this highly regulated market and honing their strategies to do so. The latest development is Amazon’s announcement last month to get into the online prescription market. In the coming years, these activities will see more and more action and bring benefits to the overall healthcare industry.
8. Changing Business Models
The trend had started long back, but it is believed to gain significant momentum in the coming times. Healthcare services will not only be delivered through traditional hospitals visits and “Fee-for-Services” model. People will visit hospitals only when needed. Many more appointments are going to be remote. Healthcare services will be offered online and through mobile apps. People will manage their prescription medicines online and will check their symptoms either online or through use-at-home kits. New use cases of home monitoring of patients will emerge. This will completely transform the existing business models and will bring new innovative healthcare delivery models.
9. Healthcare Sector+
The healthcare sector has always been regarded as a complex network of providers, insurers, policy makers and patients. This whole complex engine has carried itself along over last several decades, mostly on its own. Not anymore. Many other industries are joining hands with healthcare industry to bring benefits to the patients.
Earlier this year, In India, HDFC Bank and Apollo hospitals joined hands to launch the HealthyLife Program, that will allow HDFC bank customers to access to emergency Apollo doctor at no cost. In Oct, Lyft signed a deal with Epic for non-emergency medical transportation. The “Lyft for Epic” will make it easier for healthcare providers to order a Lyft on behalf of their patients. Epic itself has been using several technologies from sensor providers in their EMR systems. We already might have seen our interactions with providers being recorded by Google platform. There are multiple other examples. Many of these initiatives are direct result of the sufferings caused by the pandemic. Going forward, the trends are going to continue, and healthcare will no longer be an isolated industry and many more partnerships will get announced.
10. Data Driven Healthcare
And in the end, everything is about data. Healthcare will not be viewed as an industry supported by data, instead it will transform into an industry built around data. Google is focusing big on using AI solutions for healthcare built on Healthcare imaging data. Apple is using its huge reach in phone and watch market to collect and utilize terabytes of data. Amazon has already started managing the healthcare data of its own employees. All this points towards a future built on healthcare data. Multiple new solution and applications will emerge utilizing the vast array of healthcare data that has been collected over several decades.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are purely of Author. Author’s current organization or any of his previous organizations have nothing to do with the ideas expressed here.
