Abstract
Integration of digital technologies and public health (or digital healthcare) helps us to fight the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which is the biggest public health crisis humanity has faced since the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. In order to better understand the digital healthcare, this work conducted a systematic and comprehensive review of digital healthcare, with the purpose of helping us combat the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper covers the background information and research overview of digital healthcare, summarizes its applications and challenges in the COVID-19 pandemic, and finally puts forward the prospects of digital healthcare. First, main concepts, key development processes, and common application scenarios of integrating digital technologies and digital healthcare were offered in the part of background information. Second, the bibliometric techniques were used to analyze the research output, geographic distribution, discipline distribution, collaboration network, and hot topics of digital healthcare before and after COVID-19 pandemic. We found that the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly accelerated research on the integration of digital technologies and healthcare. Third, application cases of China, EU and U.S using digital technologies to fight the COVID-19 pandemic were collected and analyzed. Among these digital technologies, big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, 5G are most effective weapons to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Applications cases show that these technologies play an irreplaceable role in controlling the spread of the COVID-19. By comparing the application cases in these three regions, we contend that the key to China’s success in avoiding the second wave of COVID-19 pandemic is to integrate digital technologies and public health on a large scale without hesitation. Fourth, the application challenges of digital technologies in the public health field are summarized. These challenges mainly come from four aspects: data delays, data fragmentation, privacy security, and data security vulnerabilities. Finally, this study provides the future application prospects of digital healthcare. In addition, we also provide policy recommendations for other countries that use digital technology to combat COVID-19.
Highlights
The global Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to spread with the increasing number of infection cases [1,2]
China was the first country in the world to experience the COVID-19 pandemic, and the first country that controlled the pandemic in the shortest time [9,10]
The rest is arranged as follows: Section 2 describes the origin and evolution of digital health; Section 3 is the bibliometric analysis of digital medical research; Section 4 provides evidence that digital technologies are applied to combat COVID-19 in China; Section 5 reveals the limitations of digital technologies in fighting against the pandemic; Section 6 discusses the future development trend of digital technologies in the future and puts forward policy implications
Summary
The global Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to spread with the increasing number of infection cases [1,2]. Res. Public Health 2021, 18, 6053 measures, which effectively contained the spread of the pandemic and reduced the scale of the outbreak [11,12]. Research shows that without non-pharmacological interventions, by February 19, the 50th day of the outbreak, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases outside Wuhan will reach 744,000 (±156,000). On February 19, 29,839 confirmed cases were reported outside Wuhan, that is to say, the total number of cases occurred was reduced by 96% compared with the situation without intervention measures [13]. Existing studies equated China’s successful NPIs to control COVID-19 with obvious measures such as “city lockdown” [19,20,21], and even discuss this issue from a political or ideological perspective, but few systematically and comprehensively investigate the technical factors behind it. The rest is arranged as follows: Section 2 describes the origin and evolution of digital health; Section 3 is the bibliometric analysis of digital medical research; Section 4 provides evidence that digital technologies are applied to combat COVID-19 in China; Section 5 reveals the limitations of digital technologies in fighting against the pandemic; Section 6 discusses the future development trend of digital technologies in the future and puts forward policy implications
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