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Lessons from COVID-19: Impact on Healthcare systems and Technology

This book uncovers the impact that COVID-19 has made on healthcare and technology industry. State-of-the-art case studies, empirical research, and new trends in technology-mediated solution will be incorporated in the content to help inform and guide the readers in understanding the effects that the Covid-19 outbreak has across the healthcare and technology industry.

Purpose: This book discusses both the positive and negative impact of COVID-19 on the different sectors. Current studies show that the Covid-19 outbreak has caused most of the healthcare and technology industries to close its in-person operations and in turn have migrated to remote way of continuing its business operations. Although, the different technology-mediated solutions and contingency plans has been remarkable, there is evidence that a great amount of the innovations during this period will stay and remain part of the different organizations’ strategic and decision-making processes specially with the aim to sustain and manage the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, we note that now is the time for the medical professionals and IT experts to not only embrace the existing and emerging technology-mediated or e-health solutions but to rapidly act in ensuring that the innovative and alternative solutions are developed to fill the voids (e.g. safe face-to-face interactions of patients with health professionals, adequate digital technology literacy and infrastructure, etc) that the pandemic has spanned. Some of the areas in which the Covid-19 outbreak has disrupted, but to name a few, includes virtual learning (VL) platforms to Tele-medicine. Whereas, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are becoming fast the next frontier in clinical and technological programs and development. Also, we note that the main challenge especially for the health professionals and researchers has been on developing turn around policies or innovative measures that incorporates coping mechanisms for the stakeholders, managing continuity of the different offered services, and improving/acceleration of the healthcare systems and technology in general. Moreover, it is noteworthy to mention the speculations on how disproportionate the implications of COVID-19 have been on the healthcare and biomedical engineering and informatics sectors due to age, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status etc.