First schools closed, then businesses, and then seemingly overnight we went into lockdown. Four years ago, COVID forced much of the United States to shut down, and while Americans are slowly finding their way back to a new normal, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have had a lasting impact.
Hybrid work has replaced the standard 9-5, masks are in our cars and backpacks, and many parents who began homeschooling their kids have not stopped. While the Biden Administration and The World Health Organization dropped their emergency designations in spring 2023, some companies within the healthcare industry have been using lessons from pandemic as an opportunity to better healthcare for all.
Pfizer Global Chief Marketing Officer Drew Panayiotou sat down with SHE Media CEO Samantha Skey at the SHE Media Co-Lab at South by Southwest to talk about health innovation — and shared about the lessons they learned from COVID.
Making Healthcare Work for Everyone
While there are still many issues for which you need to see a doctor in-person, the pandemic put telehealth front and center. More people began to have doctor appointments over Zoom, patients began to track their blood pressure and take cancer screenings at home, and even refill their prescriptions online and have them mailed to their front door.
All of this is creating a healthcare world that took the burden of mundane tasks from professionals, and allowed them to do their job efficiently as possible.
“We need to talk to doctors more and understand where they are and how difficult it is to provide care,” said Panayiotou. “I care about that. How do we start making healthcare work for real people, whether it’s a doctor, a nurse, or a patient.”
And technology will play a major role. Most notably is how it is helping to eliminate the bureaucracy that comes with doing healthcare business.
“During COVID we wanted the world to be free again,” said Panayiotou. “And we found a way to just kind of not take risk where it would hurt anyone, but…make meetings shorter so that we can make decisions faster, and let’s speed up our internal processes, so that we can move quickly. And I think that lesson should be applied now that we have things like AI that can radically change healthcare.”
He pointed to the AIDS epidemic and how the technology and AI systems that we have today could have been implemented right away and saved so many lives.
Harnessing Data for Good
It’s no secret that companies are buying our data, But Panayiotou believes the consumer should be deciding how it’s used in healthcare.
“I think we just have to start having conversations around if I’m going let you have my data around my prescription or my data around something that’s in my my health, I think we have to start saying don’t make me sign a bunch of documents that I don’t understand around that data,” he said. “I want to always have control over how it’s used. And if it’s going to be used by people further down the food chain, then you should reduce my healthcare costs, and you should give me something for this.”
He offers up the idea of giving people credits for their data, which can change the relationship of how healthcare is delivered.
“And it all starts I think, particularly with AI, with the data that you have in your pocket around your health,” he said.
AI Takes a Front Seat
AI or artificial intelligence, has been used in healthcare for years. From automated text message appointment reminders to AI algorithms that can analyze medical imaging to help healthcare professionals make a diagnosis, the technology has come a long way. But Panayiotou noted that pharmaceutical companies, like Pfizer, should be leaning into AI to help prevent and even cure other diseases.
“It’s not about just pharmaceuticals, but just how healthcare is delivered,” he said. “The rate of which we can discover life saving drugs and medications that can ultimately cure cancer one day, or make cancer a chronic disease.”
AI can help in the creation of new treatments or vaccines, and even provide early cancer detection and personalized treatment plans based on patient’s data in real time. Ultimately, speeding up all the bureaucratic elements that slow companies down to discovery, to taking drugs to market to helping doctors diagnose the disease faster, to ultimately providing an experience where everyone is equally served.
“Whether it’s…cancer or navigating issues like medical gas lighting, there’s technology now to help doctors avoid bias,” said Panayiotou. “That to me is the big picture. It’s not just developing drugs, but improving how healthcare happens for every individual.”