The healthcare industry will be discussing COVID-19 lessons learned for the foreseeable future. Yet one take-away stands out as a glaring issue that demands immediate attention: keeping critical patient and public health data locked away in disconnected databases and multiple data siloes is not only unsustainable, but potentially deadly.
Of all the lessons COVID has taught the world, the critical role of data to deliver real-time insights and inform care models built on precision medicine stands out the most. Going forward, the healthcare industry must embrace infrastructures and strategies that extract the promise of medicine built around the person being treated.