Digital Health for the post-COVID-19 Pandemic in India: Emerging Technologies for Healthcare

Abstract

COVID-19 has led to unprecedented utilization of digital solutions to combat the pandemic. The purpose of the current article is to present an overview of digital technology adoption to handle COVID in the country and to explore the challenges in its continuous adoption in the current post-COVID era. This work is based on the articles, news and reports collected from literature databases like Pubmed, Ebsco, news reports, and blog and government websites. The results suggest that every aspect from successful identification of the genome component of the virus, timely detection of outbreak, monitoring, containment, risk assessment, prediction, development of vaccines to dissemination of knowledge and information related to COVID-19 is targeted through use of digital tools. Emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT), Blockchain are the focus of innovations. Telemedicine is being used increasingly for consulting. Migrant population, lack of bandwidth, infrastructure, lack of scalability and sustainability of the digital solutions, unavailability of timely information are some of the challenges to adoption. Despite the barriers and challenges, there is still a vast opportunity for the leveraging technology to combat COVID-19 spread in the country with National Digital Health Mission (NDHM), Atma Nirbhar Bharat Scheme and booming entrepreneurship models. Moreover the learnings from COVID should be utilized for improving health outcomes in the post-pandemic era.