The wider HealthTech sector also offers new smartphone apps which provide virtual access to a family doctor on demand - a trend accelerated by the arrival of COVID-19. During the pandemic, many patients found it difficult to consult their usual family doctors (GPs) when needed: the primary care system was totally overwhelmed by the pandemic (and in many countries this problem was exacerbated by a shortage of primary care doctors).
In response, dozens of pay-as-you-go apps have appeared, offering the opportunity for almost immediate consultation with a fully qualified family doctor. There are many of these apps on the market and the list includes Babylon Health, Doctor on Demand, LiveDoc, Health at Hand, LiveHealth, Dr Now, MeMD, Doctoconsult, Qare, Medicitus, Livi, Eutelmed and many more. These apps are usually specific to a nation or region in which the participating doctors are licensed to practise.
The cost of a private consultation with an online family doctor is similar across the developed world: UK-based Babylon Health charges £49 per consultation, Doctor On Demand charges $75 and European apps charge roughly equivalent amounts for consultations. For patients trying to access advice from an overloaded primary healthcare system these 'on-demand' apps provide the reassurance of same-day consultation.
Another strand of COVID’s impact of healthcare has been the rapid development of public testing and disease tracking methods, a new facet of public health, the development of which could have wider implications for the future of medicine.
Prior to the imposition of the pandemic lockdown in 2020, the UK health network (for example) had the capacity to perform no more than 5,000 COVID tests a day. Since then, a vast diagnostics network has been created at a cost of £10 billion and up to 1.9 million COVID tests are now carried out daily.
Some doctors believe that if this testing structure were maintained and repurposed, such national testing capacity could lead to an era of efficient personalised healthcare.
Much of today’s medicine is based on educated guesswork. For example, the elderly are given a flu jab because they tend to have weaker immune systems. But instead of assuming there is a drop-off in immunity for all over-50s, why not test for antibodies on an individual basis and administer vaccines only where needed? This logic could be extended to all communicable diseases (e.g. shingles, pneumonia, measles, hepatitis etc.) and the cost savings achieved by the health service would more than pay for the expense of maintaining the testing network.
