COVID-19 has unleashed an unprecedented demand for healthcare services both in terms of diagnosis and advice. With so much pressure on resources, people who suspect they have the virus are being encouraged to manage it themselves in all but the most serious cases. In practice, this means using alternative official information channels rather than going to doctors’ surgeries or hospitals. Once the pandemic is under control, this shift is likely to become a standard feature of healthcare ecosystems around the world as a way to maximise available resources. With many countries’ healthcare systems already feeling the strain prior to COVID-19, getting people to monitor their own symptoms will allow healthcare workers to focus on priority patients.

This transition won’t be straightforward. As COVID-19 has shown, existing channels are not always robust enough to manage surges in demand. In the UK, for example, there have been reports that around a quarter of calls to the NHS 111 helpline are abandoned because people can’t get through to an operator quickly enough. There have been similar challenges managing the volume of telephone enquiries in developed economies such as Australia and Germany.

For self-management to become a reality, health providers will come under pressure to upgrade websites, thoroughly overhaul their digital journeys and ensure infrastructure is able to handle the increase in traffic. The objective is to ensure that tech rather than humans can guide patients quickly and easily to the information they need to access. This will not just require a redesign of the way symptoms are identified, but also the way they are managed. Telling someone they may have a medical issue but not explaining how to deal with it will simply result in them defaulting back to traditional healthcare pathways. Similarly, trapping them in a closed tech loop that offers no recourse to a human adviser will cause frustration (something that commercial companies and utilities already understand). If, however, this paradigm shift towards ‘self-service’ is managed effectively, it won’t just help with efficient resource allocation; it will also provide rapid reassurance to people, and a more efficient, engaging service rather than allowing anxiety to build while they wait for answers to their questions or hard-to-secure appointments at their local doctors’ surgery.

Technology has a pivotal role to play when it comes to easing pressure on overstretched healthcare providers. Even before COVID-19, AI was predicted to save the US healthcare industry $52bn by 2021 through the use of AI-enabled predictive analytics to power home-based preventative healthcare solutions, such as voice, which is a natural interface for AI powered solutions. Already, it seems clear that voice assistance can play a key role in making sure people stick to a medication plan, or reassuring them that they are taking their medication at the right time and in the right amount (thus minimising the number of adverse drug reactions).

Looking ahead, tech innovations like voice will play a more prominent role in decision-making by healthcare professionals. During the COVID-19 outbreak, for example, there has been a lot of debate about how to allocate resources to those who need it most. Going forward, time-consuming triage decision-making for less serious health issues could be automated and streamlined using a voice assistance interface. Using simple guided conversations, voice tech could ask a patient simple questions to ascertain which condition they are suffering from, before telling them the steps they need to follow. This would enable surgeries and hospitals to interact with large numbers of patients without expending a lot of valuable human resources. It would be possible to make rapid and informed decisions about who is most in need of immediate healthcare support.

As always with digital transformation, there is a human aspect that has to be kept in mind and there are, of course, challenges in going down this route. In my company, as part of our process we spend considerable time understanding how users interact with different digital tools and how businesses can best engage with the individuals on the other end of the telephone or computer. Understandably, when it comes to healthcare there may be some resistance to the idea of voice/AI (rather than humans) having a prominent role in the decision-making process. Using voice to triage minor injuries (should I go to A&E immediately or put ice on my injury and go tomorrow?) could help people get used to this approach. What’s more, voice tech is becoming so sophisticated that its role in triage doesn’t need to focus just on what a person says, but how they sound. Voice biomarkers could quickly provide healthcare systems with the technology for spotting a range of conditions, from depression to heart disease, before flagging these up to healthcare professionals.

As healthcare systems integrate digital tech, the quality of data they have at their disposal will be the critical deciding factor in how much support they can give patients. Data entry is a key consideration and this is where voice tech can help. Imagine a doctor/patient consultation where key data points are captured by a voice assistant during the conversation, therefore saving the doctor from having to take notes.
The efficacy of healthcare data will be multiplied many times if a system of data sharing becomes routine. By pulling together everything that is known about admissions, diagnosis, treatment, discharge, individual patient interactions and much more, it becomes possible to improve the quality of care and reduce the strain that most healthcare systems are under.

With the right data privacy protection baked in, pooled data could form the basis of innovative applications that help consumers manage their health better and provide them with reassurance, without them having to engage directly with surgeries and hospitals.

Within the healthcare system, a unified data resource would allow authorised professionals to access a single shared overview of a patient that avoids oversights or duplicated effort. Powered by AI, this data source could also flag up relevant information from scientific research sources (patient X suffers from condition Y so may experience serious side effects from taking this medication).

In addition to the above, a more open approach to data sharing may help countries alleviate the impact of future epidemics. One move in this direction is CoEpi, an open source prototype that aims to harness the power of smartphones, social media and community epidemiology to help users track the transmission of COVID-19.
Some countries, notably South Korea, are finding it easier than others to introduce pandemic-blocking technology. But there seems little doubt that the devastating human and economic cost of COVID-19 will sway the debate in favour of more effective data-sharing strategies.

The integration of technology into healthcare raises several tough issues ranging from how to engage people with these evolving approaches, through to ensuring patient privacy and connection of the various distributed data sources. Once these tools are in place, ongoing ownership and governance are areas that, increasingly, organisations will find that they are ill-equipped to manage and that new models and tools are needed to support these initiatives. It also introduces challenges for frontline healthcare professionals who need to adapt to new working practices while also managing their existing heavy workloads.

One key learning from COVID-19 is that embracing digital technology will play a fundamental role in sustaining, and even improving, the quality of patient care while enabling healthcare workers to focus time and resources on those who need it most.

Andrew Dunbar is general manager of Appnovation EMEA