By Jyotsna Chandran
Metaverse Literally ‘eye-catching’ has gained attention as the concept promises to leapfrog the confluence of the physical world into an evolved virtual space to ultimately provide an immersive end-user experience. And it captures these emotions, a close-to-real-life experience designed to redefine the way we live.
Metaverse is already making waves in sectors like retail, banking, automobiles which are early adopters to take advantage of the opportunity. While all of these fields have leveraged the metaverse primarily to address the evolution of the end-user experience, there is one domain where the metaverse can play an empowering role and go beyond the experience. And here it is Health care The field deserves special consideration.
Let us move on to the key aspects of healthcare service delivery where Metaverse can play a revolutionary role.
Patient engagement
Patient engagement is largely kept out of the mainstream conversation around the field of health care. However, many researches over the years have shown that one of the key factors is ensuring that patients receive complete and adequate healthcare attention without skipping treatment. Some of the reported challenges to ensuring seamless patient engagement throughout include limited appointment availability, clinical shortages, and transportation barriers. Consider this situation against the background of 1:834 doctor to patient ratio prevailing in India and the magnitude of the patient engagement problem stares at us.
Using Metaverse, however, can trigger a paradigm shift in the patient engagement part of the healthcare value chain. The challenges outlined above can be overcome through the Metaverse ecosystem that can enable a clinic-like experience in the virtual world on a mutually beneficial proposition involving both the healthcare professional and the patient.
Personal attention
One of the obvious latent needs of patients apparently points to personal care and attention during treatment. In a country like India, where the overall healthcare infrastructure is still in the building phase, the personalization aspect leaves a lot to be desired. In recent years, digital technologies have helped solve this problem through the use of concepts such as AI and ML. However there is still room to increase the personalization factor, which can now be addressed by Metaverse. It does so by leveraging the physical world’s digital twin and customizing it to each patient’s needs. In fact the concept can be extended to the framework of virtual hospitals where each patient is given specific and unique attention for the treatment under consideration.
Telemedicine For remote locations
Access to health care in remote and remote parts of India is an age-old problem. Metaverse envisions a virtual hospital that can provide remote-location counseling and healthcare attention through an interface. With 5G expected to reach deeper, the delivery of telemedicine-based healthcare services on the Metaverse platform will deliver an unprecedentedly rich experience.
For healthcare service providers, such an evolution can result in opening up new revenue streams using existing infrastructure. For patients in remote locations, this can serve as a boon especially in the context of ongoing epidemic issues where easy access to healthcare facilities is of prime importance.
Legal Considerations
While multiple use cases can be implemented in the healthcare sector leveraging Metaverse, legal considerations and implications must be kept in mind. Various types of data, including personal and sensitive, are generated when users perform various activities using Metaverse. Organizations dealing with sensitive information must ensure that there is a line of demarcation between legal and personal boundaries; And follow the necessary rules. Another consideration is how government bodies will create guidelines Medical devices (Smart glasses, VR headsets, etc.). The FDA in the US has created a medical augmented reality program to facilitate this, although India currently has no specific regulations governing Metaverse. It would be best if both the government and institutions work together to ensure that guidelines are drawn up as it will be difficult to play the catchup game when there is a high level of user dependency with Metaverse.
However, the launch of Metaverse has emerged at an opportune time for the healthcare industry. When the new common world has increased healthcare for all, it will be the metaverse that can empower all to reap the benefits of a customized, engaging, evolved end-user experience enabled healthcare sector.
By Jyotsna Chandran, Delivery Manager, Digital Engineering (ZUSI Systems)
(Disclaimer: The views expressed are solely those of the author and not necessarily subscribed to by ETHealthworld. ETHealthworld.com shall not be responsible for any loss caused to any person/organization directly or indirectly.)
