Digital Economy and the Population’s Access to Medical Services

Globalization is a concept used to describe the phenomenon of intensifying cross-border flows of goods and services, technology, capital, labor and information. The world is currently going through the fourth wave of globalization, and the cyber world seems to be its final frontier. The digital economy, born during the third wave of globalization, has been consolidated through e-commerce, digital services; this type of economy is based on artificial intelligence, but it is increasingly becoming vulnerable to cyber attacks. At the same time, there is talk about negative globalization, which is spreading, among others, through the effects of climate change. The economic downturn exponentially exacerbates the material difficulties faced by already vulnerable social groups. Against this background, methods based on information and communication technology (ICT) can be a viable solution to the problem of unequal access of the population to public health services. The main objective of the article is to analyze how new technologies contribute to opening up new opportunities for the population to access medical services. The research methodology is based on consulting existing articles on PubMed and Google Scholar platforms, but also on the websites of decision-making institutions such as the Romanian and Moldavian Ministries of Health, the Romanian National Institute of Public Health, Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States, etc. One of the conclusions we reach is that international collaboration in finding solutions to the current medical crisis has manifested itself in the unprecedented development of ICTbased medical applications. Bădileanu Marina