Looking Back on Healthcare’s Toughest Battles of 2021
COVID-19 and its ramifications were the prevailing topics in the healthcare industry once again in 2021. It’s hard to overstate the enormity of the pandemic and the effect that it has had on every industry throughout the world, but the healthcare industry is the frontline where the pandemic is seen and experienced up close, and…
COVID-19 and its ramifications were the prevailing topics in the healthcare industry once again in 2021. It’s hard to overstate the enormity of the pandemic and the effect that it has had on every industry throughout the world, but the healthcare industry is the frontline where the pandemic is seen and experienced up close, and it’s also where the disruptions of supply chain challenges, worker shortages, and production workflows were most acute.
At MarketScale, we strive to cover stories from every angle of B2B. As the year comes to a close, we are highlighting three stories that are tangential to the pandemic, but still important as it relates to the current and future state of the healthcare industry.
Labor shortages are impacting industries from HVAC to construction to manufacturing. However, the factors impacting the shortage of healthcare workers run far deeper than just the pandemic.
“Shortages are getting all the headlines, and it’s true there are about 500,000 fewer health care workers than we had in February of 20 just before the pandemic. But what’s really happening here? It turns out an elder boom arrives about 70 years after a baby boom.”
Emerging technologies such as AI hold immense promise for healthcare. On his healthcare-focused podcast, I Don’t Care, MarketScale contributor Kevin Stevenson welcomed Michael Gorton, the CEO of Recuro Health, to discuss how AI can help healthcare become more proactive rather than reactive.
Key Insight:
“Anybody that knows anything about our healthcare system knows it’s not a healthcare system. It’s a sick care system,” Gorton said. “If you want to understand why costs go up year after year, it’s because we’re not keeping people healthy. We’re letting them get sick and taking care of them when they get sick.”
A top priority for many people over the past two years has been keeping themselves and their families safe. As news of a vaccine that was safe for children began to spread, many questioned what was different about this vaccine and whether or not it was safe for their children.
MarketScale sat down with Gerald Commissiong, CEO of Todos Medical, to get insight into how the industry has approached the task of vaccine research and testing for different demographics.
Key Insight:
“Everyone focused on developing an effective and safe vaccine for adults and then began to think through how to use the data from adults to develop for kids. There was some acceleration in the 12 to 15 year age gap with the Pfizer vaccine. I think that is being rethought extensively now, given some of the data and the younger kids where there is no evidence of myocarditis with a much lower dosing schedule. This could potentially be even further reduced by lengthening the spacing between doses.”
Video TranscriptExpand ↓
The next step in the fight against the COVID 19 virus has been the approval of the vaccine for children. Most recently, Pfizer announced that the vaccine that was approved is 90% effective against COVID 19. Now that the children's vaccine is here, what was its development like compared to the one for adults? Was it easier or harder? We asked commissionable CEO of todos medical. Those questions, and this is what he had to say. Certainly, with regards to the development of the vaccine, the differences are dosing. Initially, it was thought, although it's not clear why it was thought that children were not going to be affected by COVID in the same manner that adults were. As a result of that, the primary focus was really adults who were traveling from place to place. Country to country who can spread the disease. And the focus was on being able to really get people back into the office, back to work. What we found, obviously, is that getting back to work requires children to be able to get back to school. And so as we've made progress with the initial set of vaccines and really an undefined unknown dosing schedule that has been figured out through real, real world decisions by different countries to do different things than the clinical trials, that kind of approach could have been disastrous in children because we know that their immune systems are not anywhere near as developed and that potentially impacting their immune systems in a robust way very early on in development could have significant long term impacts. Because of that, I think correctly, everyone focused on developing an effective and safe vaccine for adults and then begin to think through how to use the data from adults to develop for kids. There was some acceleration in the 12 to 15 year age gap with the Pfizer vaccine. I think that is being rethought extensively now, given some of the data and the younger kids where there is no evidence of myocarditis with a much lower dosing schedule that could potentially be even further reduced with lengthening the spacing between doses. So, you know, that's really the way the development in children is different than adults. It's been easier insofar as you have the data from adults now to make those decisions. But that's obviously much harder because the hesitancy among parents to give the COVID vaccine to their kids with really not much data is quite challenging. And so bridging that gap is what the regulators are trying to do now. When fighting the COVID 19 virus, utilizing vaccines is only a part of it, but understanding the antibodies is another portion of it. Recently, todos medical announced the launch of their new COVID 19 antibody blood test, which would allow unvaccinated and vaccinated people to monitor immunity levels to the virus. We ask permission should care professionals weigh the utility of this type of testing, given the amount of at risk people they interact with on a daily basis? We think that it's absolutely essential for many, many decisions and risk assessment to know if you have neutralizing antibodies and what those titers are. When you have an understanding of whether or not everyone has the ability to develop high titers, because what we've seen is that 30% of older people over 80 in Germany develop no antibody titers. The neutralizing antibody titers and 70% of immune compromised people are taking certain drugs develop no antibody titers. So when you look at data like that, care professionals must be aware of the status of their individual patient because it's no longer good enough to say we think there's a 90% or an 85% We know that if you're seeing people who are immunocompromised, who are older, you will be seeing people for whom the vaccine has not worked every day and who are at risk of infection. And because they're in that high risk population, they are at higher risk of hospitalization and death. Therefore, it is critical for everyone who is interacting with those individuals to monitor their antibody titer status and make sure they have high antibodies. In addition to testing, because antibody titers will help reduce the risk but not eliminated, testing will tell you if that defense mechanisms failed as early as possible so that you reduce the number of people that could be exposed. And spread the virus. So in our view, it's absolutely essential for everyone who's interacting with immune compromised and older individuals to understand their immune status. To act accordingly and make sure that they take even more precautions if we see that there titers are low because they are higher risk of infection and higher risk of higher viral loads that could then pass it on to their patients. Stay up to date with the latest news on the COVID 19 vaccine, as well as antibody treatments. Be sure to head the market scale as well as subscribe.
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