by

Zakaria

Good health is an important necessity of life. No matter the amount of money accumulated, life will be unbearable if one does not have good health. As a result of this, the need for better and improved healthcare delivery is called for. 

The Covid-19 pandemic showed us many flaws in the traditional method of delivering healthcare services as many hospitals were either shut down or had its activities slowed down due to lockdown. This affected the health of many individuals as many patients with chronic illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension, mental illness could not longer access their health care providers causing a deterioration od their condition. 

The Covid-19 pandemic is an eye opener and challenges us to look for more imporoved digital method in rendering healthcare. One of such digital means is the VR/AR ( VIRTUAL REALITY AND AUGMENTED REALITY) 

WHAT IS AR/VR

Augmented reality is defined as (Wikipedia) an interactive experience of a real world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities. Whereas Virtual reality is a simulated experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world. 

As started above, the problems of the traditional method of healthcare delivery are numerous (e.g A patient is located in a difficult to access place, Issue with the limited and availability of equipment, Problem with lack of available personnel in many local institutions etc). However, all these challenges can be solved with the introduction of AR/VR into the healthcare industry. 

HOW CAN VR/AR HELP IN HEALTHCARE DELIVERY (BENEFITS TO PATIENTS AND INTUITIONS)

- Improved patient experience: Patient experience is one of those things that barely gets mentioned when it comes to talking about how AR/VR can make healthcare system better. However, patient experience is the one field that gets the most out of the implementation of VR/AR to the operation. Everytime it comes to a matter of life and death, customers experience is not the thing that comes to mind first but with AR the experience of patients can be significantly improved. Examples are chronic pateints who feel left alone when they have to go through some proceduers. This feeling of being left alone can hamper the treatment process but with some extensions through AR patients can communicate with family and loved ones through out the procedure and not feel left alone. Note that a good patient experience can be a boost in improving the condition of a patient. 

Another benefit is

- Psychological relief and treatment: VR/AR opens up a gateway towards new ways of therapy. Examples are an elaborate environment that can be used for pain reduction and improvement of sleep habits. Also VR can be used to help amputees get accustomed to their state and experience once again their missing limbs. On the other hand, specific environment can be used to treat mental conditions such as anxiety, various kinds of conditions and phobias and addictions. This is to mention but a few. 

- Medical education/training simulations: One of the biggest global challenges of health care system is an infinite lack of trained professionals. There are so many diseases but yet so few time to train and prepare medical personnels. However, this challenge can be solved with the implementation of AR/VR. How? One might ask. Well AR/VR can simplify the whole process of medical education such that simulations can be used to study the human anatomy layer by layer. It can also be used to train medical practitioners in near real life conditions. Furthermore, the VR/AR system comes with a wide array if various sensors making it possible to recreate a scenario to put the skills of trainees in a much more engaging manner. 

-Doctor consultation: Doctor consultation is one of the integral element of healthcare system. However, it is not always available in specific remote areas. Implementattion of VR services is a logical solution to this problem as doctors will be able to provide constant eye to eye contact and also deliver essential services to patients.

These are only but a few solutions to the challenges of traditional healthcare service provision if VR/AR can be implemented in healthcare delivery. 

WHAT IS YOUR BOLD DIGITAL SOLUTION 

Going from what is mentioned above, digital healthcare provision is needed in our socieity today. As a result of this my bold solution will come from our dependency in our mobile smartphone. I have come to understand that we are all so used to our smartphones and so we depend on them for almost all our daily activities thus creating an avenue for this. I will like to see the creation of an app or a platform where "all healthcare providers" can be enroled. This platform will be created such that patient can get diagnosed by a doctor with the aid of a smart band, given prescriptions for whatever drugs to acquire, purchase these drugs and have them delivered to them all without moving out their current location. The platform or app will make it possible for patients in hard to access locations to communicate directly with any healthcare provider he or she might need. This will make healthcare delivery accessible anytime and anywhere as it will cut accross national boundaries. If this is being implemented no one needs no longer wory about moving to a difficult to access zone since his healthcare provider will be right on his hands.