HAS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ENGULFED IT ALL?

With IT having engulfed it all, there is a feeling that everything can be done with this technology.* The dashboards, notifications and even the share market, the market capitalisation of IT behemoths has made us believe that we are in control of the world. From autopilots to autonomous cars, to aggregators of products and services, everything can be managed. Social media has added another nasty dimension to the whole exercise. The brick and mortar has been missed in lots of areas, to the detriment of us all and Coronavirus is one such example.

While AI is have been used to enhance and bring the stranglehold of the product and the company onto the customer, there is hardly anything in the public domain on the thousands of crying areas in health. Business intelligence, political intelligence and social media / intelligence have taken over our complete existence. Propaganda has become the order of the day in which social media takes the lead. Even the intelligence of the day Open Source Intelligence, OSINT, is very rarely used for social and health related issues.

The clear haste of making business / money the easiest way and not bothering about anything else has become the prevailing sentiment of the day. Work is not evaluated in terms of the contribution to society but what is helps earn. It has reached the surreal, the young technologists end up in McKinsy. Research is not our forte for sure in any area. Not knowing about researches happening across the globe is also our well known trait. Health intelligence does not have a portal or a feed. It does not figure in our scheme of things.

Hunan was treated as another news story. The pics of JCBs starting construction of hospitals and public fumigation was seen as if it were a movie. What it would entail to us was not even a afterthought? With claims of everything at an click of a mouse we have reached this fateful day. corporate hospitals with hotel type rooms and pharmaceutical industry driven health is not even the beginning of public health. If we could reclaim our public health and bring it to the mainstream of our life would be the biggest contribution of Coronavirus World Health Crisis.

CHINKS IN THE ARMOUR OF THE WORLD HEALTH MACHINERY IS OUT IN THE OPEN.
Sanjay Sahay
Mob – 9845246669