How COVID could improve health care

As the saying goes, it’s an ill wind that blows no good. The pandemic was clearly an ill wind. It has so far killed between four and eight million people around the world. It forced governments the world over to put their economies into an induced coma and jeopardize their future financial flexibility with an explosion of public borrowing.

On the other hand, the pandemic accelerated development and innovation in many sectors. It also changed behaviour in ways that, even if they are only partially maintained, will create challenges but also offer help and support for millions.

For one thing, digitization sped up. Many companies adopted new business models and, as a result, the transition to the digital economy is now ahead of its expected schedule by at least a few years. The possibility of both working and attending school remotely is also bringing genuine benefits in terms of saved time and improved access to large segments of the population.

The pandemic has also provided strong incentives to private corporations and public institutions alike to both diversify and increase the resilience of their global supply chains. Productivity gains, increased convenience, reduced harmful emissions and improved risk management should definitely help organizations and individuals to better navigate the next crisis — not to say that the current one is definitively over.

In many places around the world the pandemic’s negative impact on the health-care sector monopolized the news in awful ways in spring 2020 and also motivated the lockdowns. Yet health care has also seen some benefits. Telemedicine emerged in force during the pandemic. As recently as early 2020, it had been perceived as an impossible pipe dream, one widely opposed by doctors.

It’s true that telemedicine cannot always replace in-person consultations and also may have led many doctors to push patients toward tests that weren’t strictly needed, thereby creating bottlenecks elsewhere in the system. That said, when used efficiently and under the right circumstances, telemedicine and other emerging technologies are already demonstrating their immense potential in reducing waiting time at the hospital, in the doctor’s office and for surgery, as well as cutting costs for both patients and taxpayers.

The pandemic clearly exposed the structural weaknesses of the health care sector and is forcing a reorganization that should bring important benefits. These reforms are desperately needed as, with populations aging, health care costs consume more and more of both government expenses and GDP. It remains to be seen whether politicians will have the wisdom and courage to follow through on reform as the crisis subsides.

The impacts of the pandemic in terms of both scientific discoveries and altered human behaviour that may lead to very significant improvement in the prevention and healing of diseases have not been widely noted. We have heard a lot about how the pandemic has caused delays in many surgical procedures and how it may take months, even years, for the system to catch up — causing increased suffering and avoidable deaths among a population increasingly affected by diseases and ailments associated with old age.

But there have also been positive developments in health care. Social distancing, mask wearing and especially hand washing have done much to reduce the need for some types of surgical interventions. For example, long delays for children to have surgery to correct extremely painful ear infections have dwindled to almost nothing — likely thanks to the reduced spreading of germs.

Likewise, the spread of regular influenza which until recently had caused many hospitalizations and deaths — between 12,000 and 61,000 annually in the United States alone, according to the CDC — has been down by almost 90 per cent in many countries. On the other hand, the incidence of allergies rose during the pandemic, presumably the result of a more sanitized environment that is weakening our immune system’s ability to fight pathogens.

On the medication front, aside from the extraordinary development of several successful COVID-19 vaccines, the pandemic forced the medical community to focus its attention on viruses. Our improved understanding is yielding new insights into viral respiratory tract infections and promises future treatments that may one day lead to their eradication.

If we all get vaccinated and can avoid a fourth wave of the virus and a sharp rise in the number of hospitalizations, there is hope that, in the nottoo-distant future, our health system will deliver faster and improved service as well as better treatments than it did before the pandemic. For that to happen will of course require vision on the part of policy-makers but also personal accountability from each of us.

TELEMEDICINE EMERGED IN FORCE DURING THE PANDEMIC.