Thanks to pandemic, medicine is now virtually unrecognisable

The Covid-19 pandemic has been one of the greatest disruptors imaginable. We have all been forced to learn either to work remotely or to be mindful if we are still at our old workplaces. At the same time, the digitisation of our personal and professional lives has accelerated exponentially.

Medicine has seen a blend of both. It seems counterintuitive, given that this is a field best known for its bedside manner and healing touch, but the truth is that the technology was always there to allow the transition. Just as people finally used the internet, decades after its introduction, to work from home, so too have many general practitioners begun adopting technology pioneered by battlefield medics to allow specialists sitting on different continents to help them conduct complex procedures in situ.

Covid-19 has fast-tracked this innovation, because coming face to face with your doctor is a risk for both patient and doctor in a time of a pandemic, with doctors’ waiting rooms petri dishes for infection at the best of times. It’s helped too to break the taboo on telemedicine or virtual healthcare, which is now recognised and regulated by the Health Professions Council of South Africa and underwritten by local health insurance schemes.

Disruption, though, has a force of its own: just as employees will be loath to return to offices if they don’t have to once the pandemic passes, digital booking of appointments or even virtual consultations will trump traipsing across town at awkward times. It’s difficult to argue against the convenience of an immediate virtual consultation using home healthcare devices that allow for diagnostic-grade pictures of your throat and ears, as well as the sound of your heart or breathing.

Medicine can be accessed by patient or practitioner irrespective of where each one is. The pandemic has allowed a rethink of clinical pathways for the benefit of everyone. The patient doesn’t need to have tests repeated each time they are admitted; their records can be centrally archived. Scripts can be issued digitally to a dispensing pharmacy and the medicine dispatched by motorcycle carrier and tracked the same way you would a takeaway pizza or an Uber driver.

The technological transition unlocks instant, top-class, multidisciplinary medical care through digital interconnectivity, getting doctors and healthcare professionals all virtually into one room for one patient. It can spur the adoption of step-down facilities, allowing for patients who would otherwise have to have been hospitalised to receive care at a clinic or at home, attended to by a nurse who is in virtual contact with the doctor. The benefits for the general practitioner are immense, from the digital booking of consultations to the efficient management of stock, medicine and personal protective equipment, as well as record-keeping.

But that doesn’t mean it is an easy transition. Moving from an analogue practice with ledgers for appointments and patient files in paper folders to information that is always on and accessible simultaneously and remotely across platforms is a far more profound transition than just introducing your bookkeeper to the joys of Excel spreadsheets.

There’s no going back, though. Covid-19 has irreversibly changed the face of medicine, especially family medicine, yet it ironically reintroduced house calls in this country for the first time in decades, albeit virtually.

Doctors who don’t change their practices could soon find themselves going the way of the video store, not because their expertise isn’t needed but because this public health crisis has democratised and revitalised healthcare more fundamentally than Florence Nightingale did when she arrived in Turkey 167 years ago.

This opinion piece is by Jon Foster-Pedley, the dean and director of Henley Business School Africa.