Integrating Digital Technologies and Public Health to Fight Covid-19 Pandemic: Key Technologies, Applications, Challenges and Outlook of Digital Healthcare

• Main Authors: Qiang Wang, Min Su, Min Zhang, Rongrong Li
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-06-01
• Series: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
• Subjects: public health; digital technologies; COVID-19 applications; challenges; China
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/11/6053

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.