One of Biden Administration’s Top Fundraisers Could Have ‘Antidote’ to COVID-19 Hospital Shutdowns

By the day, the U.S. looks for what hopefully will be a peaceful transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden-Harris Administration, following the Associated Press’s announcement that presidential candidate Joe Biden and vice-presidential candidate, Kamala Harris are now President-Elect and Vice President-Elect, respectively.

Are We ‘Dialed In?’

Perhaps one of the more pressing questions is how we can heal our country, specifically those relationships throughout Silicon Valley? Tech entrepreneur Jon Fisher, CEO of CrowdOptic and a member of the President-elect’s National Finance Council co-hosted two Bay Area fundraisers for Biden last fall, prior to the pandemic.

And the takeaway for Fisher was the opportunity to assess Biden’s interest in and knowledge of technology following the ending of the fundraisers, according to an interview with ABC7 News. Fisher’s name has continued to circulate the internet after his commencement speech at the University of San Francisco went viral, garnering over 5 million views.

“They are dialed in,” Fisher concluded. “They always were, and I think we’re going to see big differences,” referring to the soon-to-be White House regime change come January 20, 2021. The CrowdOptic CEO is hopeful that the President-elect, along with Vice President-elect Harris, will study the more pressing issues plaguing our country that directly impact the tech sector, including, but not limited to immigration policies which attract top talent overseas, and of course, privacy.

Currently, Google is in the hot seat for alleged antitrust violations under the Trump Justice Department, which could negatively impact relationships among and between Silicon Valley’s finest, while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey are having to answer to Congress for the many, many issues their platforms have created (and neglected) throughout the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.

For this reason, focusing on the technology helping us confront the COVID-19 pandemic is an absolute essential, according to President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris. The winners of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election have released a “Seven-Point Plan” to beat COVID-19 and get our country back on track, beginning with fixing President Trump’s “testing and tracing fiasco.” Part of that requires our country to invest in next-generation testing technologies, including at-home tests and instant tests, so we can scale up our testing capacity by orders of magnitude.

Another “point” of the plan is investing $25 billion in a vaccine manufacturing and distribution plan that will guarantee it reaches every American, funded ahead of time by taxpayers.

Adding ‘Bioskills’ to the New Administration’s Arsenal

For the past 11 months that COVID-19 has been at large, Fisher and CrowdOptic have provided bioskills functionality to as many hospitals as possible. Its CrowdOptic kit addresses the issues all hospitals face as they continue to become more congested.

“Doctors cannot just hold up a phone and run Zoom for medical practices,” Fisher says. “Instead, they need HIPAA-compliant technologies...making room for CrowdOptic’s kit.” HIPAA, or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act governs the use and distribution of our health and medical information.

And according to tech-news outlet, DZone, the coronavirus pandemic has certainly revealed the dangerous truth about our technologies. “We as consumers buy into privacy risks,” the article explains, emphasizing that “convenience will always trump privacy.” In a previous interview, Fisher made the comparison of lawyers having to address the difficulties of completing their CLE requirements, with the difficulty medical professionals face with their continuing education requirement.

CrowdOptic’s partnership with National Bioskills Laboratories (NBL), one of the first physician-founded and board-certified training companies removes that geographical restriction and replaces it with A.I. and bioskills, allowing for both the medical community (and fellow practitioners) to benefit from an educational and compliance standpoint.

Back to CrowdOptic’s kit, Fisher says this makes the medical tech salesperson far more effective than the average salesman, threatening to replace the human element entirely. In today’s environment, COVID-19’s constraints continue to burden and restrict in-person viewings and collaborations, making them all the more expensive, if not impossible.

COVID-19 has changed the ways by which modern telehealth is applied, with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announcing that video-streaming technologies like Zoom could be used without violating HIPAA laws. Hence why applications such as Skype for Business / Microsoft Teams, Updox, VSee, Zoom for Healthcare, Doxy.me, Google G-Suite Hangouts Meet, Cisco Webex Meetings/ Webex Teams, Amazon Chime, GoTo Meeting, and Spruce Health Care Messenger have become widely adopted.

With CrowdOptic’s LiveConnect technology and NBL’s bioskills facilities, remote attendees, including medical students, physicians, and trainers can now stream in to actually view the surgeries as they are happening in real-time, as well as engaging in simulcast training.

And to the public's benefit and satisfaction, both CrowdOptic and NBL integrated the technology into reputable collegiate institutions, including Stanford University's Medical School.

Fisher admits that CrowdOptic is at the center of an “arms race,” in and out of lockdowns as hospitals figure out how to continue operating. “It couldn’t come at a more critical time as ICUs fill and hospitals become more under-sieged, inundated with COVID-19 patients.”

With Fisher on board, the incoming administration may have some of the best tech in its arsenal, at the highest levels. In contrast, Trump’s team gets fired and writes tell-all books.