Metaverse Means Better: How the Metaverse Continuum Is Evolving Healthcare to the Next Level

Abstract

The Metaverse is bringing the next digital era in our society and economy. It is shaped by several attributes (e.g., physical and virtual places, multidimensional human experiences, multisensorial creativity, extended communities, life-centric markets, cross industries collaborations, new social and business values, products, and services) and enabled by new technologies (cloud and artificial intelligence, extended reality, blockchain, digital twins, and edge). This chapter focuses on the attributes to understand how to manage them to create the Metaverse future. The Metaverse will encourage us to reimagine healthcare, since it also provides the healthcare ecosystem with a virtual–real collaboration space in which to create robust, meaningful experiences for all value chain stakeholders. Looking at the first actions into the global markets we envision how to bring together people, spaces, and things in both the virtual and physical worlds, and how to enable users to “inhabiting” the new digitally enhanced healthcare worlds. The future of healthcare depends on how we will be able to effectively improve the healthcare delivery and patient experiences thanks to the Metaverse. We see that there is a strong demand from people/patients to leverage new digital healthcare solutions—technologically advanced and able to actively and intelligently use patient data. But no single player can build and lead the future meta-care; therefore, nowadays there is an urgent need for the healthcare ecosystem participants (both new entrants and incumbents) to speed up the process of collaboration in a pre-competitive environment to make meta-care a concrete reality for a better and healthy world.