People worldwide are living longer. Today most people can expect to live into their sixties and beyond. At the same time, we also require more and more care, and we don’t have the necessary resources in healthcare to accommodate this. It’s easy to see that we’re facing a conflict.
Telehealth and digital health solutions have received a lot of interest as innovation opportunities, especially because of and during the Covid-19 pandemic. These solutions are here to stay, and are even crucial for the healthcare system to be able to withstand the significant evolutions and challenges the sector is facing in a sustainable manner.
Reducing time-consuming administrative tasks
It’s estimated that by 2030, we’ll have a global shortage of 15 million healthcare workers. In Belgium alone there are currently 20.000 vacancies for nurses. And in Germany, 1 in 5 physician was born abroad. Innovation across Life Sciences have provided us with solutions to increase our treatment options and life expectancy. Now it’s time to not only focus innovation on life expectancy and quality, but also on care capacity.
Aside from accelerating telehealth and digital health solutions and their adoption rates, Covid-19 also created a substantial backlog in care itself. That’s why current innovation should focus on reducing the hands-on time needed, administrative efforts, and even allowing for autonomous solutions so personnel can completely abandon those tasks. These tasks are often extremely time-consuming and offer little to no direct value to the patient. They’re worth looking into for innovative solutions, so healthcare can focus on their true added value, attending and caring for patients.
Developing digital solutions collectively
In many industries, digital solutions are already proven to be a great success. These systems can execute some of the most complex handlings with utmost care, completely automatically or even autonomously. They’re able to predict, detect and intervene, thanks to AI models. Moreover, they minimize time and human effort, and require less training requirements while optimizing user friendliness.
The public, healthcare personnel, governments and diagnostic, medical device, and pharmaceutical manufacturers, should collectively tackle this crisis and look towards digital solutions. These types of networks allow companies to address each stakeholder, and help focus on value-based preventative personalized medical solutions to prevent, diagnose and treat diseases.
The clock is ticking, so there’s no time to hesitate. Together, we can resolve and prevent enormous global shortages by developing and building on existing healthcare data. This data can help detect and diagnose diseases early on through decentralized and telehealth solutions. By detecting diseases early, we can intervene and treat them early enough. It’s only through collaborative innovation that we’ll be able to work towards a more sustainable healthcare industry.