The healthcare industry is one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing industries. According to the latest report from the World Health Organization:

“Sharp increases in government spending on health at all country income levels underpinned the rise in health spending to a new high of US $9 trillion (approximately 11% of global GDP)”.

Among the big healthcare sector, the top spending segments including the following(from Healthark):

1. Healthcare Reimbursement: $1.9tn in 2020
2. Dental Care: $342bn in 2022
3. Home Healthcare: $299bn in 2021
4. Physiotherapy: $50bn in 2021
5. Patient Engagement Soluations: $16.6bn in 2021
6. Patient Support Programmes: $11.8bn in 2019.

Some would ask is the healthcare industry spearheading the metaverse? Personally, I would say it is clearly one of the key industries that would benefits tremendously from the ultilisation of the metaverse related technologies.

According to Accenture’s Digital Health Technology Vision 2022, that 81% of healthcare executives surveyed worldwide say that they think the metaverse will have a positive impact on their organizations—nearly half said the impact will be “transformational” or “breakthrough.”

According to the report, the metaverse can offering a wide range of improvement for the healthcare sector in the following areas:

• Immersive training: Simulated operating rooms can allow medical students to safely practice procedures and doctors can use digital twins of organs to simulate surgeries to see potential outcomes without putting a patient at risk.
• Digital diagnostics: Through augmented reality, we can use movement, space and interaction to enable different types of diagnoses. For instance, by tracking eye movements, providers can identify certain neurological markers or spot eye conditions such as glaucoma.
• Patient and caregiver wellness:  The metaverse can help caregivers to learn how to care for a family member at home. Enhanced educational experiences can lead to better health literacy and stronger care plan compliance, which can ultimately improve outcomes.
• Care planning and delivery: Immersive technologies help to simulate procedures, enabling the next evolution of care planning and procedural preparation. For example, Accenture worked with Microsoft to help revolutionize surgical medicine in Mexico and Latin America. With augmented reality, surgeons can see patient records, X-rays, CT and MRI scans during procedures. RespondEye uses augmented reality to enable first respondents to access live video and audio communication with remote physicians in real-time.
• Virtual therapeutics: New digital therapies are using extended reality technologies to help patients with pain management, neurological disorders, behavioral health and their physical health. BehaVR immerses patients in virtual environments via an evidence-based platform, empowering people with lifelong coping skills and resources that extinguish stress, anxiety and fear.
• Tokenization and interoperability: Web3, blockchain and other technologies allow users to securely own, share and manage patient, provider and payer data.

Therapeutic Apheresis Services, Bristol – Red Cell Exchange patient Khan Talbert-Johnson with TAS Nurse Practitioner Liji Thomas

What the patient want?

Accenture tested more than 16 healthcare metaverse use cases and found out that the use cases people are most interested in include patient education, care delivery and connectivity, such as meeting with friends and family from afar while in the hospital.

Millennials (89%) and Gen Z (89%) are most open to opportunities from the metaverse—and this audience will represent an increasing proportion of those in need of healthcare as these generations age.

As CEO of The Metaverse Institute, I am delighted to chair a weekly twitter space in collaboration with Hashtagweb3.org, a leading #web3 professionals hosted by Vedang R. Vatsa FRSA on Friday 31 March at 14:00 London time with a panel of distinguished world leading experts to explore this interesting topic.

Andrea Greene (Director, Remedē Health, Ltd. | Medical Concierge)

Andrea Greene is the Founder of Remedē Health, a Medical, Health & Wellness Concierge start-up that is focused on digital health, Artificial Intelligence, and the metaverse for healthcare. Andrea‘s passion is to improve patient outcomes and streamline Healthcare services by leveraging power of AI and the immersive capabilities of the metaverse. Andrea‘s company is setting itself up to transform the way that patients access, manage, & experience healthcare services. With a strong commitment to improving lives in making Healthcare more accessible, Remedē Health, will be helping to redefine the healthcare industry and help to shape the future of medical, health, & wellness concierge.

Dr Michelle Tempest (Partner, Candesic | Digital Health Council, Royal Society of Medicine | Lecturer in Medical Law and Ethics, University of Cambridge)

Dr Michelle Tempest worked as a hospital doctor for over a decade. She is partner in a strategy consultancy company, Candesic, who deliver R&D level insight with CEO level clarity in specialist sectors – life sciences, healthcare, digital, medtech and education. She edited a book called ‘The Future of the NHS’ and is author of ‘Big Brain Revolution: Artificial Intelligence – Spy or Saviour’. She is a Cambridge Angel investor, mentors Femtech and Ed-tech start-ups and is on the digital council at the Royal Society of Medicine.

Dr. Shivagami Gugan (DevOps Institute Ambassador and Lead Author | Cloud and SRE Evangelist)

Shivagami is a Technologist and Aviation Specialist with extensive experience in transforming mission-critical systems to modern architectures. Having built Organizational strategies and led the Software Engineering and Infrastructure functions at the Emirates Group for a number of years, she derives inspiration when technology advancements are applied rightly to deliver business value. She is a pragmatic Technology Transformation Leader who seeks to apply Reliability Engineering and Cloud Architecture for long-standing growth and sustainability. She is a DevOps Institute ambassador and is the lead author of the SRE practitioner and the Observability foundation courses.

Dr. Alberto Melon Fernandez, MD 🧬 (Co-founder, Crotalus Labs and MetaCare Health | Medical Advisor Ibyhealth | MD hematology)

Alberto has a Medical Doctor in hematologist, with 6 years of clinical and laboratory experience. Co-investigator at 3 clinical trials. Data scientist trainee, passionate about convolutional neural networks, deep learning and their applications in basic or translational research, and clinical practice. Blockchain developer trainee, currently working on a web3 platform regarding digital decentralized stewardship, data tokenization and privacy-enabled health data management. Web3, NFTs and metaverse content creator.

1. Since the pandemic, what are the biggest challenges we are facing globally in the healthcare sector?
2. What are the most innovative technolgies that have been used to address those top challenges?
3. What gaps can the metaverse address in the healthcare sectors that was not covered by other technolgies?
4. What is our current status of using the metaverse related technologies to innovate the healthcare sector?
5. Could you please give me some examples of successful case studies where the metaverse have been efficiently deployed to solve the healthcare issues?
6. On 22 March 2023, Microsoft researchers released a paper claim that, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology, showing early signs of general intelligence, meaning that it has capabilities to exceed human intelligence. On 29 March 2023, Elon Musk and more than 1000 artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4, in an open letter citing potential risks to society. What is your opinion? Do you think we are or have reached singularity that you want to join Elon to call for pause AI research?
7. Dmitry Itskov is a Russian billionaire and part of the ‘2045 initiative’, a non-profit organisation that aims to increase lifespan. The project argues that artificial bodies will appear by 2045 which will allow people to move out of their old bodies and into new ones with the help of the Internet. He said that thanks to new AI and metaverse technologies, people will one day be able to live forever by uploading their minds to the web. The concept, called mind-uploading, would see people make digital copies of their minds that could live freely in cyberspace, unrestricted by biology. How far do you think we can achieve this? Would you like to upload your mind to the metaverse and have eternal life?

Set a reminder for 31 March 2023 – 14:00-15:00 (GMT):

If you have any questions and would like the panel to answer, please do feel free to share that in the comments. If you enjoy reading this, please subscribe, comment, like and share it with your network. Thank you!