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Similarly, everyone is familiar with 911/112/999 instance, repeat prescription drugs can be ordered
emergency call numbers, plus a range of less-urgent and authorized online, and linked with deliveries
numbers for reporting symptoms or gaining advice. from pharmacies. This also reduces the risk of
The latter tools are being supplemented with online exposure to new viruses by people attending
diagnostic or filtering websites and apps, to ease the clinics or pharmacists for routine purposes.
load on congested call-centres.
• Public information, delivered by national
But there are numerous uses of telecoms and mobile for healthcare agencies, the WHO and wider media.
healthcare that go beyond these core elements. Others For COVID-19, this includes sources such as
to consider include: videos on better hand-washing technique, as
• A key area of response in the COVID-19 crisis well as other public resources.
has been that of contact-tracing. Authorities have
used mobile network records (and broadcast • In future, we may also see wearables able to
alerts) to help work out potential vectors for detect fevers or other unusual patterns, allowing
disease transmission, clusters occurring at rapid diagnosis and perhaps even early-warning
specific events or locations and so on. of the outbreak a few days ahead of it becoming
externally apparent.
• In-hospital communications between staff,
ideally working in a fashion that can support
those wearing protective gear. Increasingly, older Remote-working and collaboration
radio systems will be replaced by Wi-Fi or local/ While many companies have adopted conferencing and
private cellular networks. cloud-based collaboration tools in recent years, these
have largely been incremental to, rather than substituting,
• Data connectivity between hospitals, labs and face-to-face meetings and events.
other sites for rapid analysis of scans, blood
tests and ongoing patient data. This will also Now, many businesses have implemented strict no-travel,
feed into near-instant analytics to determine no-conference and even no-internal meeting rules
effective courses of treatment. for their staff. This can be expected to continue for
several months at least, and may lead to longer-term
• Collaboration platforms for scientists researching organisational and behavioural shifts,
vaccines, anti-virals, epidemiology and so forth.
This can require huge network capacity not just This is driving:
for data input and sharing, but also protein- • More use of video- and web-conferencing, with
folding visualisations, international research platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams
meetings and so on. growing in usage.

• Maintaining public order and safety in quarantine • Growing use of home-working, necessitating
zones, for example with video surveillance, good residential broadband, VPNs and other
remote diagnostics and telemedicine etc. security tools, and a variety of team-collaboration
applications such as Slack. (While these are
• Reducing non-urgent calls on healthcare common in the tech industry, many sectors have
resources, allowing more effort to be focused been much more conservative in their adoption).
on epidemic response and isolated patients. For

24 CANCION 1ST QTR 2020