On-line or telephone GP appointments and other consultations could be the future of healthcare – and its potential was discussed in a video-conference meeting with more than 40 experts in the field this week.
E-Salud, Cambio de Modelo Sanitario y Covid-19 (‘E-Health: Change in Healthcare Approaches and Covid-19’) organised in part by the Merck Health Foundation was born from the premise, cited by its CEO Carmen González Madrid that the pandemic has led to a sharp rise in use of technology between patients and doctors and that this could be taken advantage of and developed further.
Tools including Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, video-conferences, telephone-based assistance and ‘online medicine’ were examined from a bio-ethical, legal and patients’ viewpoint.
Head of Healthcare Legal Advisors Fernando Abellán said: “There are reasons to believe that the processes and pace of ‘digital health’ are set to speed up. The risk of contagion is going to be around for a long while and will extend the need to use technology to reduce the presence of patients in hospitals and surgeries.”
A ‘Five Ps’ approach, proposed by medical director of Madrid’s San Carlos Clinical University Hospital Julio Mayol could be the starting point: Prediction, prevention, personalisation, population-wide, and participative.
Dr Mayol says: “We need to reinforce the idea of health against disease; what we’ve seen is that when public health is affected en masse, the health service becomes overwhelmed – a crisis in providing medical services, and a crisis that’s present throughout the health-sickness cycle among society.”
Geriatrician Dr Salomé Martín, head of technical development at Eulen Social Health, stresses that the elderly population’s ability to adapt to new technology is underestimated.
“We all thought the elderly were not going to be capable of using a tablet or a mobile phone, and during the pandemic they’ve learnt how to, and this has allowed them to communicate with their families,” she says.
In fact, technology companies worldwide specialising in ‘tablets for the elderly’ are experiencing success – ‘everyday’ language, large icons and simple functions, such as ‘call [son/daughter]’, ‘watch news’, and so on, have proven to be easy enough for even those with dementia to figure out.
This type of technology could be introduced to care homes, some of the worst-hit establishments during the pandemic, Dr Martín says.
Medical director and head of innovation for new services and Sanitas hospitals, Dr Domingo Marzal, says GP appointments ‘are already on mobile phones’ and the use of these during the Covid-19 crisis soared within his company: Throughout the whole of 2019, only 42,000 video-based consultations took place, but in 2020, over 65,000 were held in the month of April alone.
“It was a baptism by fire to see if the digital strategy we were aiming for was going to work or not. And e-health turned out to be very important when it came to the rise in mental health emergencies,” Dr Marzal said.
Processes, ITC and systems manager at Quirónsalud private hospitals network, Dr Ángel Blanco Rubio believes ‘digitalisation’ is what is now bringing about ‘the biggest change ever in medicine’, and that the ‘great change’ within this is that medicine is becoming ‘more patient-centred’.
“We need to switch from a doctor-patient relationship to a patient-doctor relationship,” he said.
“In fact, the pandemic has done more for the digital transformation than any company, institution, politician, doctor or hospital manager has done: It’s moved the whole thing forward in just two months. Many healthcare organisations have gone from zero to 75% online consultations just during the weeks of the virus.”