6 Health TechTrends That Helped Healthcare During Pandemic

While leading nations were trying to figure out the Covid, Taiwan was utilizing the power of EHR (Electronic Health Record) to manage citizens in its country. 

One year is over since the Covid pandemic outbreak. It has changed the way the world used to be. Coronavirus did not only hit the immunity system of humans but also made us realize that our health system was also not immune to the pandemic like a novel corona. It has shown governments from all over the world that though we have achieved all technological advancement, everything became obsolete just because of the unprecedented pandemic and healthcare needs the help of technology right now.

While some nations were finding it hard to face the situation by Covid, other nations were leveraging health tech to fight against the covid. In this blog, we have collected six interesting tech implementations that are pursued by nations around the world.

Real-time effective EHR implementation during the pandemic

Electronic Health Record or EHR is a useful system that is used to manage patients’ data, medical records, offers interoperability, and brings a smarter, faster healthcare system. While its usage is prevalent, some countries couldn’t utilize its benefits. Taiwan became the only country that showed an exemplary implementation of EHR. Its digital health infrastructure and central EHR played a crucial role in successful response against COVID-19. In an analysis of 11 nations, no other country has implemented a centralized, effective EHR system like Taiwan. 

Taiwan citizens were already using health cards that were integrated with the EHR system. When the outbreak was announced Taiwan government merged old data with the information of immigrants and customs and sent alerts to physicians for the citizens who were at high risk of infection.

In a study, it has shown that the US will replicate the same digital health infrastructure soon to prepare itself for the future.

Telehealth Implementation within a week

Lockdown in the pandemic showed us that we can achieve a lot even while staying at home. Even consulting with doctors became convenient more than ever. Call it helplessness due to the situation or the smartness owing to forced lockdown, but it became great for providers and patients. 

Due to its high requirement, Malaysia was one nation that implemented Telehealth in almost all the hospitals for its citizens to provide online consultation. It has achieved this success within a week. Some countries (Australia; Canada; China; Ireland; the USA)were using telemedicine and telehealth both to manage patients during covid. 

According to research done by the Databridge Market Research, the global telehealth market is registering a healthy CAGR of 22.67% in the forecast period of 2019-2026. This rise in the market can be attributed to the increasing elderly population, the growing occurrence of chronic diseases, and developments in telecommunication structure.

Bluetooth enabled contact tracing API

Who would have thought the Bluetooth would resurrect like this during a pandemic? It helped governments to track people and minimize the rate of transmission using awareness through mobile apps.

Contact tracing is a process to keep track of people who have come into contact with infected persons. This process is brought to action with the help of Bluetooth technology through API. The person with the smartphone has to install the app, switch on the Bluetooth to activate it. This app can track the proximity of the person and alert him if he is nearby the infected person.

This type of application became handy when the countries decided to end the lockdown. In India, around 100 million people have installed this app in just 40 days. 

Artificial Intelligence for Clinical Management

There is no question that Artificial Intelligence is the future of the healthcare sector. It is being used in multiple software applications to enhance healthcare management. With AI it becomes highly convenient to predict disease with the use of medical records data that helps providers to make the better decision making. 

During Covid, AI helped in clinical management by diagnosing infected individuals, predicting clinical outcomes, monitoring status, and providing capacity for telemedicine and virtual care services. It helped to enable efficient service delivery and brought patient-centered care. 

Learn how Cedar Health uses AI to enhance the healthcare process for providers.

Big data for preparedness for the fight against Covid

The COVID‐19 impacted over 200 nations and led to more than 26 million cases and over 2.04 million fatalities. The governments have been forced to form a more solid relationship with science and to incline towards data‐driven decisions for effectively responding to the unprecedented challenges caused by the pandemic. 

Big data played a distinguished role during the pandemic. It is only because of the power of data that the test result which used to take days; now available within hours. With the help of this technology scientist, epidemiologists, health workers got a massive amount of information that helped to make informed decisions to fight the COVID-19 virus. These data helped track the virus on a global basis continuously and will help to create innovation in the medical field. The researchers will utilize this data to prepare the health industry for any risk like Covid-19 in the future.

Screening for Infectious using various technologies

At the beginning of this outbreak, the temperature was the main symptom to test if the person is infected or not. Many nations started using digital thermometers in the workplace, schools, shopping malls, restaurants, etc. to stay alert and minimize the transmission of infection.

Many countries implemented various type of measures for that:

 - China used free, web-based, and cloud-based tools to screen and direct individuals to appropriate resources.

 - Taiwan used infrared thermometer cameras in airports to capture thermal images of people in real-time to detect fever.

 -  Iceland played it smartly to cover up asymptomatic patients as well. It collected data from patients and combined that data with other datasets of genomic sequencing and clinical data to get more information on the virus. To date, Iceland has the highest number of per-capita tests and the lowest per-capita mortality rate.

Conclusion 

Covid has brought significant changes. It has changed our lives and made us adapt to a new normal. Without the aid of the above-mentioned health tech, it might have taken a few years more before we could move back to our daily routine. Hence the world needs to implement health-tech as soon as possible so that we can prepare ourselves for any future pandemic.

Want to Learn More: Download our roadmap here.