TOKYO -- Digital health services such as telemedicine will stay even if the recent COVID-19 waves recede, but policymakers need to step up efforts to embrace new technology, business leaders and researchers said.

"There is always a spike in terms of usage during the peak of pandemic and as people start to go back to normal life, there will be a drop," said Wai Mun Lim, founder and CEO of Singapore health care startup Doctor Anywhere in an online seminar hosted by Nikkei Asia and the Financial Times. "But it wouldn't come back to where it was. You can see that there has definitely been a permanent shift."

Lim said COVID-19 has not only fueled demand among consumers but also caused a shift in the mindset of doctors and insurance companies. "Before the pandemic, the conversation has always been around, 'How can you help me to reduce costs?' But post pandemic... insurers now start to say, 'How can you now enable accessibility of health care to my users?'"

Others said governments are also actively pursuing collaborations with private companies in areas like vaccine production.

"There is... increasing dialogue about bringing in the private sector," in countries like India and Indonesia, said Rana Karadsheh-Haddad, regional industry director of manufacturing, agribusiness and services for South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific at International Finance Corp. She added that such moves are "precipitated by the fact that government budgets are becoming more and more constrained."

Nima Asgari, director at Asia-Pacific Observatory on health systems and policies, said the pandemic has offered many lessons on the importance of governments to plan for responses to long-running crises. Japan, for example, "had an extremely well functioning emergency medical team system which dealt with natural disasters [like] earthquakes or nuclear disasters," he said. "It wasn't designed to deal with a disaster which was going on for one year, it was designed for managing a short sharp challenge."

Clockwise from top left, Nima Asgari, Rana Karadsheh-Haddad, Stephanie Findlay, Shinsuke Muto, and Chandrakant Lahariya discuss digital health care services in an online seminar hosted by Nikkei Asia and the Financial Times.

Chandrakant Lahariya, an expert in public policy and health systems, pointed out that coordination between national and local governments is also key. In India, the response since the second wave has been more "coordinated and decentralized" which has helped keep new infections low, he said.

Shinsuke Muto, president of Tetsuyu Institute Medical Corp., said Japan's fragmented health care industry caused a lack of flexibility in responding to the outbreak but expressed optimism that "a new public private partnership [will] emerge" from the newly established Digital Agency.

Panelists also highlighted a number of challenges that remain in responding to another outbreak.

Ameera Shah, managing director at Metropolis Healthcare, said information needs to be freely and transparently shared. "The pattern of COVID has not been completely unpredictable," she said. "There are models that could show when waves are going to come, how statistics are going to play out and if this information was available, even to private industry or public across the world, we would be able to build capacity better."

There is a "huge opportunity for a startup to create new value and a profitable business model," said Yuji Yamamoto, founder and CEO of Japanese health data company MinaCare. "Still, just because the market is so large and also protected by government rules, the entry barrier is so high. So not so many startups can survive or even start in this industry."

Clockwise from top left: Lance Little, Ameera Shah, Akito Tanaka, Yuji Yamamoto and Andrew Wong speak during an online panel discussion on Oct. 6.

"If you take something like applying a digital tool like telemedicine... the incentives need to be there for the clinical world to adopt it," said Lance Little, managing director for the Asia-Pacific region at Roche Diagnostics.

"If a clinician doesn't get reimbursed for doing a tele consult but does for seeing a patient in person, then the tele consult idea is never going to fly. I would have to say that my observation [is] not too many countries are ready for the next one, at this moment in time. A few have their minds in the right place," he said.

Andrew Wong, chief health officer at Prudential Corp. Asia, said boosting digital adoption will be key to providing health care in general.

"Eighty percent of the population in the markets we operate in don't really have proper insurance coverage," he said. "There's also a significant wellness gap here, because their lifestyle is unhealthy, not to mention about the lockdown and the movement control. We believe digital is the way forward that can fill the gap."