Remember when working from home used to be a perk? Little did we know when we were building the cloud-based interfaces and bring-your-own device security protocols that made it possible to offer work-from-anywhere programs as employee incentives that we were actually building the infrastructure that would keep the economy alive during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Now, depending on where you live, many of us are heading into our 10th week of mandatory work-from-home – alongside our spouses, kids, pets and every other conceivable distraction – it’s safe to say that most of us are ready to get back to the office. But, it’s also amazing to see just how efficient the transition has been for so many companies.
The majority of the headlines about business impacts of COVID-19 have focused on the negative. The 36 million jobs lost in the U.S., the U.K. headed for its sharpest recession on record, the struggles of main street businesses to stay afloat when large swaths of the world are indoors sheltering and unable to visit restaurants, hair salons, fitness centers and many other staples of normal life. There is no question that these are massive challenges that will be with us for some time, but in recognizing the significant business damage caused by the pandemic, we should not overlook the amazing business achievements that have also come out of the experience.
These too will have a long-term impact on our economy.
The Rise of Remote Audits
The rise of remote work has been the biggest game changer during COVID-19. But it’s not just video calls and remote logins that are changing the way we work. In fact, lawmakers in England have just introduced a proposal that would give Britons the legal right to work from home once the COVID-19 lockdowns are removed.
Accordingly, the pandemic has been a catalyst to widespread adoption of fledgling remote work technologies that are now well on their way to becoming mainstays.
In the world of accounting, for example, where auditors are tasked with checking a client’s inventory, and, according to the auditing standards set by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), obtaining sufficient, appropriate audit evidence that the inventory exists and that it is in good condition, COVID-19 could have caused things to grind to a halt.
However, as the AICPA’s Chief Auditor Bob Doherer recently explained, the group is now providing guidance advocating the use of alternative means of inventory checking through the use of drones and security cameras.
This is more than a clever workaround; it is a game-changer. While remote auditing had been gaining traction recently as a more streamlined, efficient means of checking inventory than costly and time-consuming site visits, the practice had not yet gone fully mainstream. Now, with widespread use of remote auditing becoming the norm across the industry for several weeks, we are likely to see a significant uptick in use of the technology once things return to normal. That will drive an industry-wide reduction in auditing costs and dramatically shorten the time required to complete audits.
Similarly, in the world of property and casualty insurance, the use of virtual claims tools that allow customers to take photographs of damaged property and submit their claims digitally, is skyrocketing. Allstate recently estimated that 90% of all of its auto claims would soon be submitted via its digital tools.
This is a big step for the insurance industry, which has offered these solutions for many years, but struggled to get consumers to use them. According to a recent J.D. Power study, just 11% of auto insurance claimants were using digital claims tools.
Just as we’re seeing in the auditing world, the cost and efficiency gains of this digital approach versus sending a physical claims adjuster to evaluate damage will be a benefit that will be hard to ignore once the COVID-19 pandemic has passed.
Telehealth and Remote Patient Engagement Makes its Mark
Telehealth has been another big beneficiary of the worldwide movement to remote everything. After suffering through several years of low awareness and slow adoption, the technology, which enables patients to interact virtually with healthcare providers via video and teleconferencing platforms, is seeing booming volumes. During the last two weeks of March, Carenet Health, one of the country’s leading telehealth providers, reported an 80% surge in overall case volume as patients with non-urgent medical issues sought alternatives to hospitals, urgent care centers and doctors’ offices.
Although the surge in telehealth utilization has been born out of necessity, both doctors and patients are finding they really like the technology. The oncologist Rujuta Sakesena, M.D., recently wrote an op-ed describing some of the silver linings of COVID-19: “During virtual visits with patients, when I hear their children crying or see their dogs on their laps, a certain friendship develops that otherwise wouldn’t have incubated in an office setting… For some of us, our arranged marriages to telemedicine might morph into love.”
Dr. Sakesena is not alone. According to an analysis of consumer sentiment before and during COVID-19 conducted by PwC, suggests that the recent growth in popularity of telehealth will fundamentally change the way people access care well into the future. Among the advantages that have already begun to emerge as telehealth utilization has increased have been the ability to easily have family members present during a consultation and the ability to give physicians a “virtual tour” of your medicine cabinet.
The pandemic has also spawned a technological revolution in the way that pharmaceutical research and vital clinical trials are conducted. In one recent example, the life sciences company Karyopharm Therapeutics completely reinvented the process of clinical trials patient recruitment, using AI tools to identify at-risk populations to determine whether its cancer medicine, selinexor, could also be effective at treating patients with severe COVID-19.
In this particular situation, traditional means of patient recruitment would take too long and would not be effective at finding doctors and patients – many of whom were displaced in makeshift intensive care units. By tapping into powerful AI analytics that track real-world patient data for related symptoms of COVID-19, the team had their first patient enrolled in the trial in under two weeks.
That’s an amazing turn-around time for any clinical trial, let alone a trial that is taking place while the entire healthcare system is being pushed to its limits and most other clinical trials are being postponed or cancelled. Clearly, those are benefits that will carry forward into the post-COVID-19 economy.
Carrying Pandemic-Tested Tech into the New Normal
Innovations like these have been central to keeping businesses of all types moving forward when it seemed like the entire world was at risk of seizing under the weight of an unprecedented new challenge. While they were catapulted into the spotlight because of COVID-19, it is already clear that they will have staying power long after the virus has been relegated to the history books.