Here's how tech will continue to change health care, according to Verily's Dr. Jessica Mega and Dr. Fatima Paruk of Salesforce.

The pandemic proved technology and health go hand in hand

Tech

The pandemic proved technology and health go hand in hand


technology has always been integrated in our health care system. If you think about it, technology interacts with individuals and clinicians both in a deep in a broadway. When we think about deep technology, I think about things like ultrasounds or mris that give us an entirely different understanding of what's happening inside of the body. And then we also had innovations that looked longitudinal things like the electronic health record. Yes. Most physicians who are practicing in hospitals and health systems. It's the electronic health record. That was the beginning and the end of my technological adoption in healthcare as a practicing physician. But when I think about where technology has had the biggest advances in the last few years, I think about the work such as the work we're doing around precision health. We really want to think deeply not just about the clinical inputs, but all of the non clinical inputs. What's happening to a person's environment, their sleep, their stress, and how do we integrate that? And over the last two years, what we've been seeing is that there's going to be about a 1500 fold increase in health information. How do we harness that? How do we move from a one size fits all to what is really relevant to an individual. There's been this evolution of the digital front door And that is again how patients think about interacting with the health system. If there's anything that COVID-19 has taught us, it's how do you access care when and where you need it. I remember my own personal experience as I was trying to find vaccines. I remember going online looking for access to vaccines or tests when I thought I needed it the most and there's a huge digital and technological component to that. So when we think to the future now we now understand that patients want to be able to access care one where they need it. And the the implication is that digital needs to figure out how to enable that verily sits at the intersection of technology, life science and healthcare. And our purpose is to bring the promise of precision health to everyone every day for us. In particular, we have been spending about five years working on tools that allow people to be at the center of their health. But what we did is take those tools and respond to the pandemic. We heard from many different public health officials saying we need to understand how to build communities that have testing, getting the right test for the right person at the right time. Well, it turns out much of the tools and technologies, we have been working on putting people in the center creating research and clinical communities. We were able to use that same principle. So that impacted fairly tremendously. Salesforce has been at the forefront of of thinking about how we manage um employees and vaccines and just safe return to work. So the first thing they did was launched the work dot com platform and that during the height of the pandemic before we had a vaccine actually enables people to come back to the workplace and feel safe while they were doing so. The next thing they did was launch the vaccine cloud and that was instrumental in ensuring that people had access to vaccines globally and resulted in millions of shots in arms the pandemic accelerated partnerships, It accelerated innovation. It accelerated people working with government agencies and now that we have this energy, we need to apply it not only does the pandemic, but this next wave of health conditions. When you look at chronic disease, like cardiovascular disease, diabetes or even opioid use disorder, how do we take all of these learnings? How do we take, bringing the right test to the right patient at the right time or getting people on treatments are accelerating vaccines. How do we take those same principles and get ahead now of more chronic conditions and those that are going to truly be the next wave of a pandemic. So the next progression that is going to be incredibly important is health equity. Health equity is huge and we need to do a better job of ensuring that every single person, regardless of their background or social determinants of health or existing barriers to care can be met where they are whenever they need it and have a high quality standard of care that is being delivered that gives them the best shot and optimal outcomes. Technology has been core to medicine. The piece that's important is to make sure that the technology adds value, that it does something good for people that helps clinicians in the job that they do. And so right now we're seeing an acceleration in terms of technology, drawing new health insights, technology connecting people. But the real point is to make sure it adds value and it improves clinical outcomes. And if that's done right, then technology will continue to have a huge place as we think about healthcare of the future.