AstraZeneca boss Pascal Soriot has said healthcare systems need greater flexibility and digital innovation to enable remote treatment if they are to better deal with future pandemics. 

Soriot’s firm has been at the forefront of the fight against Covid-19, producing a cheap, easily-shipped vaccine against the novel coronavirus. 

But Soriot said one of the most significant elements of the pandemic was the number of other serious diseases which had not been treated properly due to a lack of digital innovation within global healthcare. 

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“You have a big indirect impact of Covid-19 on other diseases. We’ve seen a substantial drop – 20 to 30 per cent – in the diagnoses of cancers, we’ve seen a drop in the number of heart attacks being treated in hospital.

“Why? Because people were scared of going to hospital, and the systems were not capable of processing (those) people” during the Covid pandemic, he continued. 

Soriot said out of hospital treatment was hugely important. 

“We need to think about flexibility and agility of (healthcare systems) and the use of digital, so that more and more you look at how you can treat and diagnose patients outside of hospitals, reducing the use of hospitals, so you can better use the capacity you have in the hospital,” he said. 

Healthcare systems across the world are assessing how they can modernise their systems, with a host of healthtech firms trying to digitise more mundane elements of the day-to-day work of entities like the NHS.

Soriot was speaking at the World Health Assembly.

Soriot also confirmed that he hoped those countries pushing ahead with their vaccination programme would take a bigger role in the Covax problem, supplying vaccines to the developing world.

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