The COVID-19 pandemic has driven countries across the world into catastrophe, forcing millions of
people into near-total lockdown which arose with problems such as struggling to deal with extreme
social isolation and physical distance measures, pending employment and access to treatment. This
pandemic's sudden appearance and its far-reaching effects have become a shocking wake-up call for all
the people in the world, especially the patients and healthcare professionals. Technological advances
today such as digital technologies has proven its effectiveness and importance which gave its consumers
almost complete interconnectivity to the whole world. They can be used to address key problems
and/or challenges in ensuring the well-being of every person that has the possibility of being infected
which is generated and disseminated to reach every individual in the world. Fighting a pandemic as
extreme as COVID-19 needs urgent action and tools that speed up care delivery in a variety of settings
that can quickly diagnose coronavirus cases. Digital tools such as telemedicine and digital devices play a
key role in minimizing the COVID-19 outbreak. The COVID-19 pandemic brought new light to
telemedicine. Telemedicine electronically examines, monitors, and treats patients at home while
providing them with professional clinical data and minimizes any kind of physical interaction that helps
patients to stay at home and which reduces or avoids the spread of COVID-19. Both the Center for
Disease Control and Prevention as well as the World Health Organization advocate telemedicine to
monitor patients and reduce their risk of spreading the virus by travel to hospitals. ("COVID-19 and the
rise of Telemedicine - The Medical Futurist", 2020) Combined with the opportunity to interact with
pharmacists and health care professionals through virtual appointments and consultations, the patient
may participate more effectively with their diagnosis and overall well-being which will place them in a
better situation. With adherence reporting and summary dashboard, this kind of technology could be
provided to the health care providers, therefore, giving them a chance to both better understand how
patients are taking medications and how the patients answer questions regarding their health and
medication-related questions. Here in the Philippines, several medical groups in different fields have
launched digital consulting services to reach out to common people whose autonomy is limited during
enhanced population quarantine and to alleviate hospitals that are now overburdened in the battle
against coronavirus disease 2019. The Lung Center of the Philippines launched the COVID Ask Force on
Facebook that provides free appointment referrals from the first 1,000 patients per day. This also
advised Facebook users to be vigilant to share their private meetings on social media due to
misinformation and privacy concerns. For a long period, several people have been disconnected from
their physicians. With this online platform, it's going to be able to reach out to them, offer knowledge,
and alleviate their concerns.
Smartphones play a vital role in observing a patient's health with an application such as WebMD which
has features including a symptom checker, basic first aid, reviews of drugs and treatments, and lists of
local health care providers. In other countries, they have an application such as Apple COVID-19, which
was developed to monitor people infected with COVID-19 and track registered individuals using GPS
from their devices. It also provides an online screening resource and some advice on when to seek
COVID-19 testing. On this app, you'll also get answers to your commonly asked COVID-19 questions.
Here in our country, the Philippines, Filipino researchers, and students have recently established a
mobile phone app and a comprehensive information portal as the country continues its fight against a
novel coronavirus outbreak. An online tracker of the COVID-19 situation in the country was published by
a team from the University of the Philippines, while students at the Asian Institute of Management
created an application that provides its users with a free medical assessment. The developer based in
Manila and the task force of the Philippines have also launched an online and mobile application,
StaySafe.ph, which can monitor individuals with COVID-19 symptoms and enables users to disclose their
health condition and that of their family members (Esguerra, 2020). Such developments have been
introduced during an increase in the number of reported cases in our country.
The key to addressing this situation
is to always have the right information.
The Philippine government empowers the people by offering free access to such places and
helping them acquire knowledge that will allow them to defend themselves, their family, and
communities. There are cities here in our country, Philippines, that use technology to fight COVID-19.
For example, is the Pasig City, one of Metro Manila's 17 member cities and under Mayor Vico Sotto's
leadership, has recently procured drones to disinfect the city to help stop the spread of coronavirus
infection. The Pasig City government allows electric kick scooters to be used inside the designated bike
lanes to provide secure passageways for people who do not have private cars but plan to go out to buy
their vital needs and to help frontline employees and health workers in the city to and from neighboring
cities. here in Manila City, Mayor Isko Moreno has announced that doctors, nurses, and healthcare
personnel from various Manila hospitals will be transported regularly to and from their respective
destinations. And in Marikina, the city government established its laboratory and COVID-19 testing
facility with the equipment available that will be provided free of charge to city health care providers
and reported COVID-19 cases.
This pandemic has ignited enormous demand for digital health technology solutions and has unveiled
effective solutions such as population screening, infection monitoring, resource usage, and allocation
prioritization, and targeted response design. Those developments are the start of a new future. The
COVID-19 pandemic, which certainly won't vanish anytime soon, is also a health-care system awakening.
From now on, governments across the globe must make a renewed and re-positioned investment in
their healthcare systems. It is time for our Philippine government to give more importance to our
health-care institutions, raise the salaries of health-care practitioners, and invest in personal protective
equipment and medical equipment to provide patients with quality care.
