Leveraging a Data-driven Approach for Digital Transformation in Healthcare - Key Takeaways

Today’s discussion with Benedict Sulaiman S.Kom., MM., CFP , Vice President Information Technology, Director, Ramsay Sime Darby Healthcare (CLOSED) Indonesia, Elliot Jones , Account Director, ASEAN, Snowflake , Joseph Ho, Senior Solution Architect, Singapore Operations, IHH Healthcare , Nantha Subramanian , Chief Digital & Technology Officer, KPJ Healthcare Bhd , Sajit Menon, Strategic Architect, ASEAN, Talend , and Dr. Thitipong Nandhabiwat , President and Chief Executive Officer, Thonburi Bamrungmuang Hospital , highlighted the priorities in data usage for hospitals and healthcare facilities in ASEAN, along with key challenges and how to address them, importance of government support, and future opportunities.

The panel highlighted that focus of delivering quality patient care and experience as a key outcome of data applications for healthcare services.?

Nantha mentioned reducing administrative burden through data insights as a key benefit, with examples in optimising disease management, personalising medication, and supporting clinical trials. In addition to efficiency of patient care, Joseph mentioned benefits in personalised medication delivery, shorter waiting times, streamlined administrative processes, optimising billing, and forecasting internal loads to accommodate increased demand.

For Dr Thitipong at Thonburi Bamrungmuang Hospital, a key priority for the hospital is to provide five-star patient experience with distinctive services and a digital experience, which requires doctors across different generations to change their working style and adapt to digital, paperless systems, thus enabling analysis of data to improve patient outcomes and provide patients with access to the health information through mobile devices.

Elliot observes a need for a 360-degree view of the patient, which includes financial details, provider-generated data, social health and wellness data, and patient-generated clinical insights. As the amount of available data grows exponentially with increasing adoption of IoT devices, wearables, and telehealth avenues. The challenge is to integrate all of this data into a patient's profile.

Challenges for the 2nd Most Regulated Sector After Banking

Despite the efficiency provided by data insights, a key challenge includes designing systems that can cater to changing patient consent and the need for patients to be aware of their own conditions and when to seek medical assistance.

Elliot highlighted that challenges in healthcare technology include data quality issues, data exchange and collaboration, data management and scaling, and integrating disparate data points into a holistic patient profile. In a similar vein, Nantha highlights that the focus should be on the value proposition and use case for the data, with the need for the right infrastructure and platform to extract, consolidate, store securely, and share the data.

Speaking from his experience in the banking sector, Nantha highlighted a key difference in data complexity for the healthcare sector - having a single medical record across hospitals with similar brands is unlikely as the registration is hospital-centric, and while having an EMR platform to consolidate patient records would be ideal, it's not currently happening due to different data sets and formats coming from imaging, lab systems, PAC systems, and EMR systems.

Technology to Meet Healthcare Business Needs

Nantha observes that as the healthcare industry is shifting towards digitalization and smart hospitals. One of the most important learnings is that data strategy and digital technology should not be seen as IT projects, but as business projects that require a cross-functional team. The biggest threat to this digitalization is cyber threats and ransomware attacks, which are growing in the healthcare industry.

Thitipong discusses the importance of having project owners for each business unit and establishing a transformation management office to oversee projects and ensure change management. However, the challenge lies in getting everyone on board with the changes. They suggest having a change management team and agents to help drive the transformation with different business units.A subsidiary company called Medical Intelligence is focused on providing technology to hospitals, including implementing hospital information systems for the primary healthcare group and other chain hospitals.

Sajit mentioned that the technology for upgrading to cloud-based data platforms is available and cost-effective due to economies of scale, but the challenge lies in transitioning from traditional on-premises systems.

Implementing a new HIS can take at least six months, especially for larger hospitals. Pak Benedict highlighted that core systems need to be changed, and setting up a centralised data repository through a data lake and data warehouses can improve the trustworthiness of the data. With the hospital relying heavily on the EMR system, a problem with the EMR system will cause operations to cease, so contingency plans are important.

Nantha also cautions against automating a broken process, and finds it important to fix the process first, understanding who's delivering what, ensuring that value is added, improving processes first, before automating it and exploring digitalisation for data driven insights.

In addition to core systems and technology, Elliot observed that the rise of digital native companies, such as telcos offering telehealth services, has shifted customer expectations. Good connectivity, audio, and visual quality are also essential for enabling telehealth services.

Government Support and Domestic Priorities: Future Opportunities for Technology-driven Innovations for the Healthcare Sector

As a result of the government's push for a national electronic health record, healthcare providers in Singapore are following common standards including drug, procedure, facility codes among others to enable easy exchange of information.

Dr. Thitipong aims to push for a health information exchange in Thailand to benefit the entire country and utilise technology in hospitals to optimise costs, staffing and predicting demand for services.

In accordance with PDPA regulation in Thailand, the patients themselves are owners of their data themselves, and while seamless services can be provided with their consent, a private government cloud or similar mechanism is necessary to ensure the secure and encrypted flow of data.

In Indonesia, following the launch of Indonesia’s One Health Initiative which requires hospitals to submit daily medical treatment activities for each patient, the standardisation of the data warehouse mechanism is important, and improving data governance and collaboration with third-party payment companies and insurance is important for enhancing patient experience. A new privacy law released by the government in August 2022 establishes standards for medical and general data, which Pak Benedict highlights saves time and effort compared to individual companies creating their own governance.

Elliot also mentioned how a fully automated platform was built in the Philippines within two to three weeks to process 95 million vaccine records for over 90 million Filipinos, which would not be possible without a secured government platform.

Some areas of opportunity brought up include preventive healthcare, Internet of medical things, and exploring new channels for healthcare services including collaboration opportunities with consumer-facing businesses like OTAs and e-commerce players.

This is part of the AIBP Insights series on Data-driven Businesses in ASEAN focused on the?Banking & Financial Services?and Manufacturing sector. Join us at the upcoming session on?Data-driven Manufacturing & Supply Chains in ASEAN?on 18 April 2023. Do feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] if you wish to join us, or if there are topics around digitalisation you would like to hear more of!