How a Pandemic Instantly Removed All Resistance To Healthcare Innovation

Healthcare has long been ripe for innovation, and the Covid-19 pandemic has served as a major catalyst.

I would presume that for all my fellow healthcare futurists and innovators who have been promoting healthcare innovation for years the global response to this pandemic must feel as frustrating as it is for me!

On the one hand all our innovation projects we have been trying to get approved for years were finally implemented over night due to the healthcare crisis and on the other hand we all feel incredibly frustrated that if there had not been such a resistance to change we could have been much better prepared to deal with this pandemic by using our collective global digital technology arsenal. However, during the Pre-Covid19 era we needed extensive business plans, ridiculous ROI projection spreadsheets and endless hours wasted instead of improving global population health.

Top healthcare innovations during the Covid-19 pandemic:

• RNA vaccines

• Apps that can detect COVID remotely

• Drones that provide and deliver medical supply

• Chatbots assisting patients

• Advanced stethoscopes that monitor quarantined patients

• Robots delivering COVID-19 relief

• 3D Printing nasal testing swabs

• Low-cost ventilators 

• Cloud-based CPAP remote monitoring  

In reviewing all the top healthcare innovation trends during the Covid-19, it is highly ironic that every single one could have either prevented this pandemic, or limited the rapid expansion, or aid in the treatment of those severe cases or at least facilitated the logistics of our global healthcare response... such as telehealth, wearables, implants, AI, precision medicine, robotics, drones, 3D printing, AR/VR technology, blockchain to just mention a few.

The two major barriers we have usually encountered when attempting to secure approval for implementing some of these amazing technologies were: fear of disruption and cost. As every corporate innovator knows, it was notoriously difficult to prove the ROI for Innovation Projects (akin to impossible) and most C-Suites would find the proposals rather utopian. With the massive global economic impact we are witnessing with this pandemic, I hope that it is evident now how a proactive preventive approach would have had a significantly lower cost on our society and perhaps could have even saved lives!

So what are these Healthcare Innovations and how are they helping the pandemic now? What can we learn from this pandemic and how can we demand reinvention of healthcare post-crisis so that future generations do not have to experience this type of trauma and helplessness?

We have an opportunity to totally redefine wellness, healthcare and improve global population health. By using telehealth, AI, genomics, precision medicine, drones, robotics, 3D, wearables, IoB, IoT, virtual medical twins and design state-of-the-art hospitals equipped with all the technologies we have available globally across industries we can hopefully truly disrupt old legacy sick-care models and focus on eradicating or preventing disease, deliver personalized care and never ever have to experience the embarrassment of not having protective equipment for our medical providers, have to choose which patient gets a ventilator or have no medications for our patients!

The non-healthcare giants have proven that their modern logistics and supply chain systems are much more effective, agile and healthcare organizations need to seriously revise their strategic plans for the next decade ( examples are Ali Baba, Amazon, Elon Musk, Dyson, Google, Walmart etc).

In closing, I hope that as a society we learn from this experience and demand a disruption of healthcare delivery models, healthcare supply chain systems, promote a shift from only treating disease to preventing disease and aim to maintain wellness. It is also my belief that we have the unique opportunity to break down inter-disciplinary silos, share scientific advancements across geographic and institutional borders for all diseases just like we have done now for Covid-19- sadly just too late.

In a nirvana-like healthcare futurist's world, one would envision the same global efforts deployed after this pandemic emerged in order to create a new exponential medicine world and offer future generations the human right of optimized population health.