iSOFT Health Asia general manager Dr Timothy Nam said the healthcare industry has been slower than other sectors in adopting IT solutions. "Having to manage, as well as maintain, healthcare's legacy systems and upkeep its traditional best practices, many called the health sector extremely backward. In fact, quite a number of observers have declared it as being 20 years behind the banking sector."
However, Dr Nam said many factors have speeded up IT adoption, making healthcare the new frontier in Asia for the IT industry. "Major areas of concern include the progressing age of the world's population, especially in Asia, and their continued call for reduced costs in healthcare. One of the ways to address this is 'Closed Loop Medication Management' [CLMM] approach."
He said CLMM was a strategy to rationalise medication management portfolio, which consists of the hospital's various existing solution, namely pharmacy system, billing, patient administration and other types of legacy solutions into a view of progressive convergence overtime towards a single suite based on a modern shared services platform. "This approach will also provide a seamless CLMM on both conventional desktops and mobile devices, with development of new mobile device compliant interfaces enabling users to choose between traditional computers on wheels or more modern and less costly mobile devices."
"These demands have drawn out major support from governments as they poured in massive amounts of funding to improve state-managed health offerings," said Dr Nam. "Such efforts can be found primarily in emerging economies as they invest heavily in this sector to improve its general public's health and well-being."
"If we want to cater to the rising public demands for better services at lower price-points, then we, as healthcare providers, can no longer isolate ourselves anymore from adopting IT," Dr Nam said. "However, it is the rapid progress the Internet and the advent of cloud computing that has been nurturing this drive for IT innovation and service integration within the health sector."
"This includes the presence of social networks, availability of enriched multimedia facilities, improved collaborative communications, and reliable high-speed broadband infrastructure - all of which are now critical elements for healthcare services and made possible with the growing popularity of cloud computing," he said.
"In addition, the digital era has transformed the way consumers interact with medical facilities as they have easy access to a vast trove of information related to healthcare," said Dr Nam. "Current service offerings in the health sector also have experienced similar improvements. These advancements are very apparent in the areas of knowledge access, collaborative efforts, and technology innovations."
"Even now, young doctors accustomed to social networking have been pushing for change, introducing new and more convenient practices into the industry," he said. "This up-and-coming workforce are already asking why they cannot log onto an online portal and dispense drugs to patients remotely which is now made possible through the cloud.".
"By adopting IT into its operations, the healthcare industry has improved tremendously in many areas," added Dr Nam. "Besides innovating services that focus on value for money, better practices and enhanced offerings have also been introduced. This includes transparent and interactive medical information sharing activities across the healthcare value chain, improvements on medical and healthcare service standards, and an increased focus on preventive healthcare."
"These developments have made it clear that IT is the prime enabler for the healthcare industry," said Dr Nam. "Current examples of on-going advancements include consumer driven healthcare, preventive health research, tele-healthcare, biotech, and enhanced collaborative efforts between pharmaceuticals."
"Cloud technologies will result in better IT integration with health services over the coming years," he said. "Interestingly, one major innovation that many are expecting to see soon is a unified architecture for healthcare services. Such facilities will provide and improve on process scalability as well as total service-awareness for health providers."
"Current demands for improved healthcare services will see the emergence of next generation IT companies," said Dr Nam. "These new comers will be the ones who will help enhance the available medical services that we have now. As such, it is now a matter of when these IT market players will be able to work with the healthcare industry to produce the critical innovations that it currently needs."
"Collaboration with other IT providers such as Microsoft would help to deliver a better level of healthcare in Asia," said Dr Nam. "We are extremely pleased to be partnering with Microsoft to realise cost-effective healthcare solutions that are interoperable and which meet the needs of both patients and healthcare providers so that the entire health ecosystem can be engaged in achieving a more proactive and sustainable healthcare model."
Microsoft Asia-Pacific's corporate PR lead Michael Ang agreed with the importance of collaboration. "Cloud services today encompass a broad range of possibilities such as online health and wellness tools, application development, data and image storage and sharing. IT innovation can help to bring the healthcare industry to the next level."