We find ourselves in an interesting place as the COVID-19 Pandemic begins to settle. Our medical world was facing a shortage of professionals, and in some cases still is. The number of patients facing healthcare needs continue to grow. The Emergency Care centers are overrun as they face long waits trying to find space to accommodate their patients. We expend a massive amount of man power shuffling people through patient processing procedures as they enter care facilities to validate patient information tacked on to the additional stresses patients face traveling between their homes to care facilities.
There is a solution to this problem and it is the Metaverse. Some may see moving to a virtual environment as distancing clinicians from patients but on the other side and depending on the care needed, this is an advancement in healthcare and a way to strengthen the trust between clinicians and patients. These benefits can be seen in areas such as virtual? Visit s, remote surgeries, and mental health programs.
Expanding and Expediting Patient Care
The Metaverse is opening opportunities for patient treatment to be expedited through the removal of geographic barriers that have caused delays in treatment in the past. I can get on my healthcare provider app and in 10 minutes be on the phone to discuss my symptoms. In less than two hours, my prescription is ready to go at my selected pharmacy. We are also seeing surgical procedures trialing augmented reality programs to perform remote surgeries allowing doctors to maintain a single geographic location while helping people across a country or countries.
AR VR Surgical Training
As the augmented and virtual reality headsets advance through major providers such as Oculus, Microsoft, and Apple, we see new opportunities for surgical training. Most residents who attend a medical program look to be mentored by the best. Think about a world where a resident can put on their virtual reality headset and step into their training program in their home vs reading a textbook. These programs would give residents the ability to sharpen their technical skills along with hand-eye coordination through mock surgeries. This allows them to spend more time in the hospital focusing on patient interaction.
Empowering Patients to Make Decisions
The Metaverse is also giving us a new avenue to create change through proactive care. Due to the overrun in our healthcare system, patients have taken an interest in analyzing their own health information through connected fitness devices and mobile apps. This proactive and accountable approach to health creates an environment where our medical facilities become the second line of defense and patients become their own first line of defense. Patients can analyze their daily activities through mobile apps and coupled by AI, identify patterns that have contributed to their ailments and take the appropriate action.
This shift in our healthcare world has created a spike in the demand for mobile technologies accompanied by data science to provide medical professionals and patients with the data they need to make informed decisions and help reshape our healthcare world, as we know it.
