“Tech cannot stop the pandemic, but can help us to fight it off”

Technology has pervaded healthcare to initiate services like telemedicine, e-pharmacy, personal health management, home healthcare, and others- but both providers and consumers were slow to adopt these services.

- Soma Tah

Things however changed drastically when the pandemic hit us. But can we use technology to keep future pandemics at bay?

Well, technology cannot stop the pandemic, but it can warn, empower, and equip people, countries, and health systems with better preparedness to reduce the impact considerably.

“Predicting pandemics is possible today with technology. Technology can help identify the seriousness of a particular disease pattern, whether it can take control of the world the way COVID-19 did or not and many such things. Despite that, some diseases will continue to remain unavoidable. In that case, we can try to prevent the spread of the outbreak and keep it localized. For example, we had enough information about the COVID outbreak in China. If we were quick enough to act on that piece of information, we could have gotten away from the pandemic in a much better shape,” said, Karthik Rajagopal, Chief Operating Officer, Manipal Health Enterprises while he was speaking on the topic, ‘How to keep future pandemics at bay’ in the PCQuest HealthTech Forum.