What Medicine Will Look Like In 2021 and Beyond

February 6, 2021 | By

   During the tumultuous year of 2020, there were many breakthroughs in medicine in such a short period of time. At the root of these breakthroughs are the advancing technologies that give doctors and researchers much more capability than ever before. And though technology is advancing, the next question to tackle is how can technology be more effectively incorporated into medical fields to allow even faster responses to future outbreaks such that COVID-19 was.

   On one hand, technology allows us to work more efficiently, create large quantities of product in a short amount of time, and be incredibly more accurate, as human error is removed. On the other hand however, technology is only able to help on the back end with distribution and manufacturing, as humans still have to input research and development before technology is able to help. These ideas of technologies strengths and weaknesses can be observed best in the last year, throughout the COVID-19 response. In the entire first step of creating a vaccine, researchers are physical people who have to utilize their knowledge and their coworkers knowledge in order to create samples for testing that, if they prove effective, will be distributed around the world. The major target in years to come is reducing the time that is needed by human researchers and doctors by involving more technology in the process. Meaning that in the future, we could hope to see a response that is even faster and more efficient than the COVID-19 response was.