Despite the situation, medical personnel have to take action. How do we protect healthcare specialists, operators, support areas, without putting the patient at greater risk?

The 2020 health crisis exposed the current health system’s limitations. Modern medicine has always structured it as a system of care focused on face-to-face interaction. Although there have been great advances in recent years in relation to medical diagnosis and treatment, the foundations of the provision of care have not changed much. This is still mostly done in person within

In the future, innovation will focus on patient care, throughout his or her life, wherever he or she may be

the four walls of hospitals where people requiring attention come to be treated by a team of clinical professionals.

The health system has never seen a global pandemic like the one we are experiencing right now, which demands almost all the resources of medical institutions and controls the majority of their decisions. Like many sectors, this pandemic forced the health industry to reinvent itself and find the opportunity that, for many, seemed hidden at the bottom of Pandora's box but had ultimately always been within our grasp: remote care. Those of us who work in the health technology field know that in the future, innovation will focus on patient care, throughout his or her life, wherever he or she may be, without the patient being inside a hospital.

The pandemic forced all institutions to expand their sphere of influence to also focus on prevention, education and monitoring of patients remotely, a fundamental step to control their flow into the institutions, reduce the risk of exposure of medical personnel and prevent hospitals from becoming sources of contagion. The technology for these needs has been within our reach for at least 10 years, however, the traditional model of face-to-face care and the distrust of many health professionals or patients towards the effectiveness of remote consultations, led to a failure to generate an adequate environment for their use.

For the next few years, the challenges will focus on detailed knowledge of the patient

So 2020 was a year to establish the infrastructure and capabilities needed for medicine and patient care to make the expected leap in innovation. For the next few years, the challenges will focus on detailed knowledge of the patient , on incorporating continuous measurement of critical parameters, on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for interpreting data and suggesting actions, and on the connectivity of all experts who must examine or treat the same patient simultaneously, bringing us closer to the dream of generating omnipresent, comprehensive and personalized care for everyone who needs it, an aspect that is necessary for medicine to direct its entire structure towards proactive rather than reactive treatment.

In modern history, Western medicine has focused on solving problems after they occur rather than preventing them. COVID-19 forced the health system to take stronger preventive actions, opening the doors for this change of our way of thinking, that now runs through clinical practice; an aspect that is bringing benefits for another of the great problems facing public health: the treatment of chronic patients.

Before the pandemic, chronic patients accounted for 80% of global health care spending. In recent years, bad habits of modern life have increased the number of patients with chronic diseases, and everything indicates that this year, quarantine, stress, lack of physical activity and medical care for the general population, has increased these numbers. We know that a patient's best results are achieved thanks to a continuous interaction of holistic treatment by a health team, promoting changes in the patient's habits and allowing close and preventive control that reduces critical episodes.

The reality is that thanks to the new technological infrastructure deployed in recent months and the tactics of collecting patient data generated remotely and continuously, a true "technological scalpel" is being shaped. This will usher in a new era of personalized care, in which we must consider all the individual characteristics of their profiles, in real time and from all sources of information (institutions, physicians and caregivers) that have contact with such individual, understanding that the patient is a patient at all times, whether at home, on the street or with their family.

Knowing the importance of the omnipresence and the transversality of medical care, this year at NEORIS, we promote the initiative Club Nueva Salud, which brings together our clients from Spain and Latin America. The Club was created in February, with the understanding that this year would represent an unprecedented challenge for the health industry where we needed to network globally to share as much learning as possible. We have dedicated ourselves to the organization of round tables of dialogue and debate, to the creation of documents that reflect the lessons of these months, trying to set the course for the medicine of tomorrow.

In April we applied some of these lessons in one of our biggest success stories, and in just two weeks we created a digital tool for one of the largest health institutions in the region to care for COVID-19 patients remotely, expanding their coverage and opportunity in providing care. The solution, called Patient Track, was a success in promoting patient awareness and education, remote, real time monitoring by nurses, referral to hospitals in an orderly manner and by severity of cases, reducing hospital visits and increasing the attention capacity by having medical staff trained remotely from the different network centers or from their homes. Once again, the technology was within reach and could be deployed in a very short time, bringing enormous value to the remote care of the population. It simply took executive conviction, understanding of needs and coordinated work of a multidisciplinary team.

The challenge will be to improve the patient experience and generate tools that make the continuity of care sustainable

more challenges and we have the obligation to learn from what we have experienced. We'll have a lot more information to leverage from. Medical devices are already connected to various networks and remote monitoring protocols have been established and refined. The challenge now is how to efficiently use this information and shape it so that every health organization can anticipate the waves of outbreaks, consultations peaks, chronic disease patients’ followup and their outlook in the different geographical areas where AI and the Internet of Things (IoT) will be key technologies to achieve this.

We know that in the coming year technology will continue to support operational efficiency and face-to-face attention in hospitals and organizations that are part of the health ecosystem. The challenge will be to improve the patient experience and generate tools that make the continuity of care sustainable; where the continuous monitoring (telemonitoring) data analyzed with AI, remote consultations (teleconsultations), education and care (tele-education) will give us the basis to identify priorities in prevention, promotion and health education. This information, with the help of CRM, will give us the 360 view of the patient and allow us to efficiently choose where to invest efforts and resources so that the health industry can have a greater positive impact on our daily lives.

To download the full report:
https://www.neoris.com/en/insights-2021