In Australia, there has been a slow increase in the number of COVID-19 cases—this is something we had been expecting with some trepidation. As a clinician, it is stressful for me to hear that COVID-19 appears to have had different impacts in different countries, although we all share the challenge of increased demand on limited healthcare resources. The Australian healthcare industry is bracing itself for this spike in demand, not knowing when or if the number of COVID-19 cases will escalate to a point that our health system is in crisis.
Industry perspective
In Australia and New Zealand, the impact of COVID-19 has been over an extended period. Being so close to China, we’ve been aware of a major threat from the potential spread across the region since late January 2020.
The first changes came within medical research with a focus on efforts to understand the coronavirus, and look to treatments and, eventually, a vaccine. The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute) in Melbourne successfully grew the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) for the first time outside China. This was provided to the World Health Organization, which made it available to expert laboratories around the world.
Health services and healthcare professionals are now looking at building capacity to cope with the increasing number of COVID-19 cases. In Australia, the available ICU beds and our ability to increase them is being assessed and it is considered that the current baseline of 2,378 beds will need to be greater than 4,000. To further extend the availability of ICU beds, there has been government support to manufacture ventilators onshore similar to other countries, such as the US.
Responding to COVID-19
Several examples, in which the measures to improve our capacity during the COVID-19 crisis, are shaping our industry for the future:
- The introduction of telehealth as a standard approach to medical consults—with rebates for all medical practitioner services—has seen adoption by general practitioners (GPs) and medical specialists across the board. In this way, they can continue consulting whilst limiting their risk of exposure to COVID-19. Telehealth has been limited in use until now. This crisis has pushed an aspirational delivery model to the forefront as almost the only manner in which medical practitioners are delivering services today.
- The use of data and AI to help develop a clinical decision support dashboard, is allowing intensivists to more effectively assess patients on entry and whilst in ICU and help ensure they can give the most effective care. This project has required global engagement with data from other countries underpinning the algorithms development and supporting the data analysis. This approach will reshape our industry with clinicians both collaborating and re-evaluating the value of tools like AI, in order to deliver insights.
- Lack of trained health professionals, in particular nursing staff, has spurred the introduction of programs for upskilling. One program trains general nurses for working in intensive care to build up a sufficient workforce for ICUs. The acceptance that online training programs can adequately upskill nurses for more specialized roles will open up new opportunities for healthcare professionals.
- The impact to our supply chain for critical healthcare supplies has now reshaped our view of sourcing strategies. To fill the gaps, governments are supporting onshore manufacturers to restart manufacturing in Australia. Some of the examples are personalized protection equipment (PPE) and invasive mechanical ventilators. Much of these have been sourced offshore; however, COVID-19 has made it apparent we need to have reliability and continuity for supply for the end-to-end health system.
- IBM is supporting a health organization using a solution called Enhanced Contact Tracing (ECT) to support discovery of COVID-19 case contacts. An immense amount of time and resources is involved in the existing manual process of contact tracing analysis of exposed COVID-19 patients. Collecting, transcribing, and analyzing the data can't scale with the growth curve of a pandemic. ECT is able to significantly enhance the analysts’ capabilities of pandemic-related analysis through the use of a cognitive solution that has traditionally been used in an “all-source” intelligence capacity. The key challenge in this type of analysis is the ability to minimize the time requirement and increase the accuracy of identification to flatten the exposure curve.
The new normal for the healthcare industry will see more digital communications, better use of data, employing tools such as AI to derive insights, and more leverage of compute power to underpin our research efforts.
The consumer has been ready for digital communications with health professionals, but providers have been reluctant to change their delivery models. COVID-19 has forced the profession to adopt telehealth as routine consultation methodology to protect both them and their patients from COVID-19. This will prove to the GPs and specialists that this is an effective method and can improve their capability to serve.
COVID-19 has also pushed our health systems to their limits, and this experience will leave systems looking to have insights to better manage both services and clinical practice. Data as a resource and AI as a necessary tool to gain insights will inform both health service operations and clinical practices in the future. Operational management will be the first to look to adopting optimization and automation tools to underpin its services. Clinicians will follow in addressing the shortcomings of the current systems by harnessing data to gain insights for their practices.
Lastly, medical research has been at the front, looking at translating research into medical practice. The use of supercomputing in the quest to solve health challenges is being proven during the search for COVID-19 solutions. The underpinning capability of compute power to support and super-charge their research activities will be a core capability for success.
In Australia and New Zealand, we have yet to see the full impact of COVID-19. The question for the healthcare system is, “Have we done enough?” It is now clear how pivotal our healthcare systems are to the health of our population AND as a plank to a healthy economy—something many had seemingly forgotten.
To support our clients, IBM has developed best practices and recommendations for actions to take now and after the pandemic. Click here to access our COVID-19 Action Guide and related resources.
