Preparing for Covid-19
By: Global Coalition On Aging
Tags: Innovation, Homecare, Health, Business, AI

We have been preparing for Covid-19, but just didn’t know it. While not explicitly designed for this pandemic, key healthcare advances like remote care, home care, and pharmaceutical innovation now position our health ecosystem to scale solutions that would not have otherwise been possible. These advances also hold promise far beyond the current crisis, as we look to the future of health and its role in economic and fiscal stability in a world defined by more old than young. Indeed, it’s both timely and perhaps ironically inauspicious that in the first quarter of the new decade — marking the launch of the UN/WHO Decade of Healthy Ageing — we are living with a pandemic that challenges the core goal for that effort: healthier longevity.

In three key areas, our health ecosystem has been evolving in a way that prepares us not just for Covid-19, but also for the Decade’s long-term vision of society in an “older world” — not only 2 billion over 60, but more old than young across every nation as it modernizes (see Japan and virtually all EU countries):

First, a range of professionals in the health ecosystem are taking on new, important roles. Recent news stories have spotlighted the essential work of nurses, doctors, hospital workers, and firemen on the frontlines, but another group of professionals is also stepping up and transforming their role: elder caregivers in the home. Elder home care is a cottage industry basically started by Paul and Lori Hogan when they opened Home Instead Senior Care, just 25 years ago, out of Omaha, Nebraska. Elder home care is now global and one of the pillars of the $15 trillion (pre-Covid-19) silver economy — which is evolving before our eyes to perform essential and often central roles to oversee, manage, and enable healthcare delivery. Before Covid-19, elder home care tended to focus on the two ends of the spectrum of care need — activities of daily living on one end and Alzheimer’s care on the other (a less visible, but fast-growing pandemic). Today and tomorrow, we now know elder home care becomes fully part of the healthcare ecosystem, which will require different skills, competencies, education, and training for caregivers. The result will be a home care service force that looks very different even mid-way through our Decade of Healthy Ageing. Out of Covid-19, the shape and pace are moving fast; keep a close eye on this one.

Second, remote care technologies, enabled by AI, are moving to the frontlines of monitoring, detection, diagnosis, and even treatment. To date, technology advances in remote care have largely been a “nice-to-have” add-on for support and data management inside our existing hospital infrastructure. Covid-19 changes this dynamic. In an environment where we all want to avoid physically being in a hospital — especially those of us over 55 and people with any form of compromised immune system — these technology tools can go right into our home and communities, literally becoming the new standard of care. Telehealth and telemedicine are in greater use today — reportedly advancing 10 years in just one week as a consequence of Covid-19. Remote care itself is ideally suited to this crisis and will continue to expand and scale across the Decade of Healthy Ageing, especially where older people’s health needs are more central to health systems themselves. Remote care will save lives and bend the health spending curve. Its use in Covid-19 would have been impossible without the advances of the last decade — unwittingly preparing for today’s stay-at-home essential.

Third, we — society, all of us, on whatever end of the political or ideological spectrum — more fully appreciate, welcome, and demand the private sector’s role in innovation. As we fight Covid-19, new biomedical therapies for treatment, vaccines for prevention, and technology assistance for early diagnosis and public health management are essential. But the need for these kinds of innovations reaches far beyond the current pandemic, as they are critical for the goals of the Decade of Healthy Ageing. We are now seeing innovation at an incredible speed, including those who have scientifically, quickly, and with insight and genius reached into their existing portfolios to retrofit urgent solutions, including access for those in need through philanthropy. Pharmaceutical companies’ medicine chests, research pipeline, army of scientists and healthcare professionals, and, perhaps most importantly, scalability have been decades in development. As valuable as this “preparation” has been for Covid-19, it is central to the goals of the Decade of Healthy Ageing.

Contrary to the second-guessing and received wisdom in the media, these three areas illustrate that, in many ways, our health systems were better prepared for this pandemic than at any previous point in history. Or, to put it another way, imagine the pandemic if we didn’t have these three channels for urgent pick-up. Of course, we were not prepared explicitly for a global pandemic of the sort Covid-19 has become. But we have been preparing in a way that these solutions can readily be scaled for both the crisis and a new health ecosystem after Covid-19. From the moment of recognized crisis, private-sector companies in elder home care, pharma, technology, health, and financial services have been putting into action the basics of their models, even as they adjust and adapt for today’s pandemic crisis.

Many commentators have compared the Covid-19 pandemic to World War II, and it’s an apt comparison in this way: while neither the UK nor the U.S. was fully prepared for the last World War, we had the basics prepared to move into action, scale, and succeed. And out of that scaling came advances and progress the multiplied exponentially in the post-war years. It’s not too soon to apply these lessons for today’s and the Decade’s needs.