Developing countries’ customized approach in navigating through the COVID challenges

Consumers in the developing countries are becoming comfortable with the use of digital activities across all categories of daily operations- from delivery to at-home entertainment to education to health and fitness

Amidst COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare has seen a drastic shift just in the past few months alone with unprecendented adoption of technology that is going nowhere post COVID-19. Consumers in the developing countries are becoming comfortable with the use of digital activities across all categories of daily operations- from delivery to at-home entertainment to education to health and fitness. And when it comes to healthcare, no-touch service has quickly become the cornerstone of how care is and will be delivered to the consumers, even when the current COVID-19 pandemic subsides. And it should not come as a surprise that developing economies, with low current technology implementation but high propensity to adopt will be benefit the most from this technology wave.

The developing countries have their own set of policy and administrative challenges and what has worked for western countries may not be relevant for developing countries. Institutionalization of data capture along with various global health organizations’ patnerships have provided the low and middle-income economies with mammoth of information but they are still in mid of trying to make best use of this data. What further confounds the issue is difficulty in leveraging this data to their own national and sub-nationla health frameworks. The standard practices, and tools can help share best principles and learning but there is an inherent risk of healthcare framework fragmenting and not being able to fully absorb these learnings.

If we see across the continents, data analytics and artifical intelligence (AI) have been extremely helpful, in not only predicting COVID cases or track the growth of cases, but also in optimizing hospital resources, prevent spread of disease and provide crucial information about the disease spread. But the developing countries are not able to leverage the traditional data models due to their relatively high population, inaccessible areas throughout, difficulty in implementation of moels and lack of existing advanced infrastructure – all of which are key elements for successful deployment of data analytics for COVID tracing.

For e.g., Brunei, a small island in South-east Asia with a population of less than half a million gradually recently lifted its limited physical and social distancing ban as a part of their Phase-1 relaxation. The government developed an app called ‘BruHealth’ which would track people using services such as malls, restaraunts, sport facilities but only when approved through this contact tracing app BruHealth. The government has been vouching for BruHealth, that requires all residents to download the app before they could be given a go-ahead to visit public places. The application is not restricted only to consumers but could also be leveraged by business owners who can apply for re-opening of their business premises via a customized QR Code

Developing countries affected by the pandemic ar etrying to use customize solutions that would work best for their population. They are in a unique sitiation where they not only face this immense challenge of bringing its citizens back to work from remote and inaccessibe areas but only prevents a recurrence of COVID.

Looking at India, with over 1.3 billion in population, 70% of which resides in rural inaccessible area, a need for developing a customized cost-effective data application has been there from day 1 of COVID spread. Indian government developed a novel coronavirus tracking app, Aarogya Setu, though controversial on data privacy ground, and was implemented through voluntary and mandates guidelines across the country. Many countries with the likes of China, Germany and UK have developed similar tracking devices based on Bluetooth or GPS to give “exposure notifications” to those who have interacted with someone suspected or found to have covid-19. Aarogya Setu, goes one step ahead and in not only tracking these events but providing a color coded mark as a proxy for severity of infection. And to supplement these features, Aarogya Setu also provides a one-stop shop for telemedicine, e-pharmacy, and other contactless non-critical healthcare services. With over a million downloads and active users, this app has become a mandate solution to curb the coronavirus spread in a large country like India.

Unexpected shocks in developing countries is forcing government to reflect and adopt customized technology that will work best for their landscape. They government, regulatory bodies and public-private partnerships are working hand-in-hand to develop and implement novel processes for safeguarding their nation’s interest. The biggest and the foremost challenge in front of developing economies in addressing the crisis is: to improve GDP, allocate resources to immediate focus areas, embrace digital technologies, make operations customizable and adopt collaborative thinking between public and private stakeholders. Countries which will be able to do so will come out of this pandemic healthier and more resilient, and more likely to persist through the downturn and thrive in the next normal.