Key Trends in Asia-Pacific Digital Health

Increasing EMR adoption is fundamental in generating data sets required to adopt other innovative technologies that can improve healthcare outcomes at a population level.

However, the full benefits of digitization can only be realized if the whole ecosystem; systems, hospitals, and health systems capture and share information seamlessly. One of the surveys done by Frost & Sullivan across APAC, revealed that 83.6% of the healthcare IT decision makers felt that the lack of interoperability had a severe or a high impact on the hospital. Only through efficient capture and seamless exchange of high-quality data can APAC successfully pursue initiatives around analytics and other services. Countries such as Australia and Singapore have a national electronic health record (EHR) platform and Malaysia has a national data warehouse that enables sharing of patient records between public hospitals.

APAC countries have now started investing in integrated platforms that enable data capture, analysis, and management across diverse care settings. Australia is leading the way and South Western Sydney PHN was the first to implement seamless information exchange between primary and acute care.The government of Singapore has plans to integrate the private practice into its National Electronic Health Record platform. Malaysia has launched an integrated patient record platform for public primary care in the state of Johor. The effort to integrate diverse care settings will continue in these countries and other neighboring countries will start looking in this direction.

Artificial intelligence technologies continue to gain popularity across India, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, and South Korea in oncology. APAC countries are exploring various opportunities to leverage AI technologies to address healthcare challenges specific to their countries. Cognitive solutions are also used for ophthalmology in Singapore.

The next wave in APAC digital health market would be precision medicine. Local consumer-focused genetics vendors in APAC are gaining customer base and some of the leading international precision medicine vendors are looking to expanding into APAC next year. In Singapore, vendors are collaborating to providing pharmacogenomics based treatment options to oncology patients. China announced that precision medicine is a future opportunity for the country and it allocating USD 9 billion over 15 years on precision medicine initiatives.

Despite the ambitious future plans, the adoption of local and international standards which are instrumental in improving the quality of health data, has been alarmingly low in APAC. Lack of direct incentive for providers, insufficient education from the standards organizations and delay in regulatory reform are some of the reasons. APAC is already addressing technological challenges but the problem of ‘human interoperability’ is what willcause delay in achieving the goals.