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Thumbnail: While urban healthcare has always been a major social and political issue, the pandemic magnified the need for a coordinated effort to deliver care and gather data under extreme circumstances. This piece will discuss the growing intersection of healthcare, technology, and urban life and how ICD Healthcare Network will be expanding its coverage of Smart Cities Healthcare.
Call for Contributors
The convergence of smart cities and healthcare has never been more tangible than in the last three years. The interrelationship between public health, population health, healthcare enterprises, neighborhoods, and digital transformation, coupled with the myriad of departments in the 21st-century city, created some of the most significant collaborative challenges in the history of cities and healthcare.
Cities currently represent just 3% of the world’s territory but harbor 55% of the world’s population. By 2050, it’s estimated that 70% of the world’s population will live in urban centers (5). Additionally, 90% of COVID-19 cases worldwide occurred in cities (8), yet healthcare access and quality are significantly higher in urban centers than in rural and remote populations.
To reinforce the technology backbone behind the proliferation of smart cities around the world –– the global Internet of Things (IoT) -based healthcare market is expected to grow at 29.9% to reach $322.2 billion by 2025!
As the pandemic theoretically recedes, what learnings from these stressors, shocks, successes, and failures will remain, and which may never be seen again?
Having launched a media company specifically focusing on Smart and Resilient Cities in 2015, it was interesting to see how many in that sector considered “smart” as marketing hype. Eventually, the many Smart Cities divisions were subsumed into other technology divisions where “smartness” was already assumed in areas like the cloud and IoT.
But as has been said thousands of times, “healthcare is different,” and public health may be even more different after all we’ve gone through since 2020. So, it is crucial to explore how healthcare and city governments have converged and the unique challenges in deploying technology-driven healthcare strategies in those settings.
For this reason, ICD Healthcare Network will be launching a new editorial section and clearinghouse that covers these critical issues.
Click here to review the content themes that will be covered and for which we welcome outsider contributors.
If you have expertise in these areas and would like to be a member of our contributor network for the ICD Healthcare Network, please contact me directly at fcutitta@icdhealth.net