I always believed that medical care would evolve to an online Virtual Care system, also sometimes called Telehealth. but with Covid, it has been forced to happen much faster than even I anticipated. With Doctors and Healthcare professionals worried about contact with possible virus vectors, and the same from the patients, it has exploded into reality. A lot of patients are now looking for a Digital Front Door to healthcare. That being said, it has happened so fast that a lot of it is still in the experimental stage. I myself have been part of it. The basic system is that you go to a local Lab for any blood or specimen samples. They send it to another lab for testing, then results are sent to your doctor. They then contact you for setting up a phone or Zoom interview to discuss your results, with usually a digital prescription to your local Pharmacy. (another area that is going online)
The thing that I find that is a little disconcerting, is the lack of hands on diagnosis that comes from it. Normally you would call up your doctor with a perceived medical problem, setup an appointment, then get probed or prodded in all of the locations of complaint. That part of it, at the moment seems to have fallen a bit off the radar unless the problem is severe enough to cause alarms to happen.
That being said, the upswing in Health Tech has been happening fairly rapidly, especially in the areas of wearables such as Fitbit, Garmin, Samsung, etc. I myself have had a Fitbit for a couple of years, to monitor my exercise, heart rate and sleep cycles. But now some of the latest ones are also capable of measuring blood pressure, oxygen levels, and ECG measurements as well as heart rate irregularities. The other thing is that you can send your doctor your recorded measurements for diagnosis. Of course with all new technologies, sometimes the accuracy might be a little off, so buyer beware.
But the more interesting things that are happening in health tech, are the developments in monitoring patents with more critical health problems. Using AI, they can measure a patient’s pulse, respiration, oxygen saturation, temperature and mobility. and can provide physicians with real-time updates regarding their patient’s health, allowing them to handle complications promptly.
New tech like digital pills, Smart Bras, BioPatchs, Smart ovulation monitoring bracelets, temperature patches, etc... are all coming online for use.
So on another note, I've also noticed that a lot of these devices (including fitbit now) have premium subscription services as part of their offerings to get full access to all of their devices data. Who would have thought...
The scary part, is when you get devices that offer to analyze your state of mind... If you create a voice profile and turn on the microphones on the Halo Band, it listens passively in the background, sampling speech samples every 10 minutes or so, to work out your state of mind. I personally find that a bit creepy...
As well, the medical professions have been looking at and using remote robotic surgery for quite some time, but with the situation we are in, it has accelerated the need for the technology, and it has evolved into many different forms.
I certainly can see that Remote Healthcare is steaming ahead, With AI, I expect that robot diagnostic centers will evolve, you just go lay down on a scanning bed, and everything is checked. I then theorize that we might see mobile surgical units in trailers (minus the surgeons) that roam the country stopping in remote locations to handle groups of surgeries in that area. (It might be a while yet:) I wonder what all the Nurses and Doctors are thinking about their future.