The health situation is taking a dry run on healthcare. The frontiers are courageously providing healthcare services, but the next normal for healthcare will appear nothing like the normal we left behind. From the past two years, positive means negative. In addition to this, we’ve been discussing the future of health. Foreseeing what healthcare might look like in 2030, how it might take form, and the sweeping changes that would occur between now and then.
Other than causing mass destruction, the novel coronavirus revealed severe underlying problems in the United States’ healthcare structure. In doing so, however, the contagion points toward modifications that could enhance our capability to cope with severe diseases in the future and satisfy the Americans’ basic healthcare necessities.
Organizations are adapting to tried-and-tested policies and emerging new ones to fast-track healthcare innovation and battle the coronavirus worldwide. From revolutionary techniques to 3D printing of personal protective equipment (PPE), here is how the healthcare sector is battling against the health situation.
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Opportunities for the Federal Policy Reform
Indeed, there’s a bright side to this national trauma. It can alter national psychology and build opportunities for significant reform. But, whether the coronavirus will do so remains uncertain. If it does not, the health situation may pave a path for some meaningful incremental changes that are usually tricky for our partisan and highly divided political institutions to undertake.
Significant reforms may prove helpful in the area of public health, where recent events have made scarcities so evident. Furthermore, if you consider yourself a purpose-driven person and want to contribute to the public healthcare sector, an online MPA could be the best option to serve as an active participant.
Here, we focus on policy solutions at the federal standard because the health situation has illustrated federal leadership’s role and its effectiveness in the current healthcare system.
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3D Printed Swabs Designed with AI
Based on Belfast Axial3D, an AI software company focusing on medical 3D printing to design anatomical models, has contributed to combating the health situation. The company used its 3D capability in modern ways to print ventilator parts, provide nasopharyngeal swabs for testing, and face shields.
Following clinical trials in Florida and New York, thousands of designed swabs gather samples across the USA, Asia, and Europe. Measuring about 15cm, these are manufactured on Formlabs printers on invasive instructions and retain samples.
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Ventilating through the Cloud
The health situation enabled San Diego-based ResMed, a vendor in ventilation and sleep gadgets, to accelerate the release of AirView. In other terms, it refers to patients’ data management software.
With this cloud-based structure, cellular chips in ventilation devices transfer data, which is then sorted and made available to clinicians in an accessible format. Besides that, it enables troubleshooting, management by exception, and triaging patients. Also, the medical staff can alter the settings remotely.
Indeed, this innovation has been an inflection point, being adopted rapidly, benefiting clinicians, patients, and the overall healthcare sector.
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Portable Protection for the Health Situation
Personal protective equipment (PPE) has been a vital point of discussion through the health situation. Aerosol-generating airway management tactics create particular risks for medical staff; thus, PPE received recognition.
With the ability to limit the transmission of coronavirus, the healthcare settings are using infection control and prevention measures, of which PPE is a fundamental part. It is essential to minimize the transmission and acquisition of the virus to protect both the patients and the health professionals. Moreover, PPE has played a significant role in the healthcare department to help fight against this.
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Lower Financial Barriers
The United States has sternly debated for almost a century on how to safeguard Americans against the price of illness. Due to the sudden health situation, patients had a free hand on out-of-pocket payments. Most underprivileged patients can benefit through government funding for treatment and testing in countries without expansive health insurance coverage.
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Adaptation of Care Delivery Models
Currently, clinical protocols are being rapidly established based on emerging experience and data. These new protocols include expanding home-based services, creating dedicated treatment, ordering medicines on prescription discount through online platforms, engaging patients with chronic conditions via technology, and rescheduling non-emergent procedures.
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Ethnic and Radical Disparities in Healthcare
The health situation transforms attention on how the healthcare system can upgrade health inequities. Through universal coverage– an act to improve access to preventative and primary care services, governments are able to minimize the severity of chronic ailments that worsen the health effects of disasters of all types. Other than that, expanded health coverage under the ACA has abridged the uninsured rate across all groups, ethnic and racial minorities saw the most significant gains in access and coverage to care.
Conclusion
The health situation evokes the cliché attributed to Winston Churchill: never let a crisis go to waste. Now, we have the opportunity to reform a healthcare system by mitigating the identified gaps that made the coronavirus far more vicious in the United States than it had to be.
The seven policies labeled here offer healthcare front-runners a path to sail across the next normal – a normal that looks unlike any in the following years before this, the chaos that changed everything.
