10 Characteristics of Heathcare’s New Reality

Digital front door: The only front door. Hospital outpatient and general practitioner appointments across the world have been transformed with as much as threequarters of all consultations now taking place virtually.

‘Clean’ and ‘dirty’ sites (Green and Blue). In response to the pandemic, health systems across the globe have introduced strict infection control measures including the separation of COVID and NON-COVID patients, to prevent spread in hospitals and care homes.

‘Hot’ and ‘cold’ sites: New patient flows. Cold sites deliver NON-COVID care in order to lower infection risk, operate efficiently without interrupting acute work and create capacity for elective procedures. Establishing hot and cold sites will be imperative to delivering the kind of new patient flows necessitated by COVID-19.

Public Private Partnerships have been formed in some countries to help expand public sector capacity in this way.

Scaled up primary care and centralized specialty

services. With COVID-19, we have seen a continued push by health systems towards delivering care in the right setting, especially in out-of-hospital care settings (e.g. primary care, home and community care, etc.). This rapid increase in demand has exposed the lack of scale and centralization of the primary care and specialty services, which will be necessary in facilitating any health system’s entry into the POST-COVID-19 new reality.

Aged care services: Achilles heel? Managing the spread of the virus has been a challenge in long-term care facilities across the globe.