Will remote healthcare outlast COVID-19?

It’s been almost 120 days since the first COVID-19 patient died in China.

Humanity is addressing an exponential challenge with an exponential response. In the first 90 days, we were able to sequence the virus’s RNA, build an effective PCR test for its discovery, cut its performance time by 1,000, harness our mobile data to curb its spread and get more than 150 drug and vaccine candidates into varying stages of clinical trials.

Now, think of this virus attacking a decade ago. When text messages cost money, there was virtually no cloud computing, no bandwidth to speak of, and computation power was still prohibitively expensive.

We would have been looking at an order of magnitude of casualties by now.

As this revolution in drug discovery and human adaptation is underway, many of the rules and regulations that hindered the growth of remote care were removed. To name a few: Medicare now reimburses remote care, physicians can practice across state lines, pharmacists can upskill and perform more clinical-grade services and more.