A year into the coronavirus pandemic, there are reasons to hope that the worst will soon be behind us. Healthcare professionals are administering vaccines at a rate of more than 1 million shots per day in the U.S., and public health officials predict that life could return to something approaching “normal” by this fall.

However, even once the pandemic is over, organizations will be able to leverage the technology solutions they have deployed to help them navigate the crisis. Many industry observers have already noted the ways that cloud collaboration and remote work solutions will change the future of business. Here are three more (sometimes overlooked) COVID-19-era technologies that will continue to have an impact in the coming years.

Until the 1990s, organizations typically had only one kind of computing device to offer end users: the desktop computer. In more recent years, as laptops shrank in size and smartphones emerged, there were some who believed that devices might one day converge again into a single, unified form factor.

That hasn’t happened. Instead, more device types are available today than ever, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for organizations looking to equip their employees for optimal productivity. Instead, IT and business leaders must make decisions based on their specific business goals.

Here are some of the most common objectives that come up in our conversations with IT leaders at organizations across a variety of industries — and which devices are most likely to help organizations meet them.

Unlike any other disease in recent times, COVID-19 has changed the way hospitals and other healthcare organizations use technology. Healthcare organizations are, of course, accustomed to handling patients with serious and highly contagious illnesses, but the nature of this pandemic has forced clinicians to adopt many of the same social distancing measures as professionals in other organizations. Mobile technology is helping these clinicians do their jobs as they follow social distancing guidelines.

While mobile devices and applications have made significant inroads in healthcare in recent years, clinical mobility is now more important than ever. Here are six ways that healthcare organizations are relying on clinical mobility to help them navigate the coronavirus crisis.

5G is the next generation of mobile broadband, and it will eventually replace consumers’ and corporations’ 4G LTE connections. With 5G, users will see exponentially faster download and upload speeds, with drastic reductions in latency. This will open up a new world of possibilities, and it’s easy to understand why the technology is the subject of such breathless coverage in the press.

At the moment, the reality of 5G doesn’t match this hype, but that’s only because the infrastructure isn’t in place yet. Most serious industry observers predict that it will take at least a year or two for wireless carriers to build out 5G networks capable of supporting widescale use. But once that infrastructure is in place, it truly will change the world — and businesses should begin preparing today.

In my role as product manager at CDW for emerging technologies, I work with vendors that are producing some amazing new solutions. Many of these products are being taken up by emergency response and public safety organizations.

When it comes to emergency response, technologies such as drones and augmented reality (AV) and virtual reality (VR) are capable of assisting frontline workers in safely executing their tasks. Healthcare professionals and first responders can leverage those same technologies to maintain social distance and support early detection of contamination, and can also use mobile devices to stay in contact with non-urgent medical patients. Read about more use cases for emerging technologies.

Last fall, I was preparing for major abdominal surgery that would keep me in the hospital for a week, with an additional seven weeks of recovery at home. I knew from previous experience that pain management would be a challenge, and I knew through my work at CDW that there’s growing interest in using virtual reality (VR) to help patients manage their pain.

I decided to serve as a guinea pig, bringing an Oculus Go headset with me to the hospital to see whether it would actually help with my recovery. Here’s what I learned: