Key Trends in Asia-Pacific Digital Health

By Shalani Andria, Industry Analyst, Transformational Health, Frost & Sullivan

Shalani Andria, Industry Analyst, Transformational Health, Frost & Sullivan

The need to deliver high quality affordable care enabled by technologies is urgent in Asia Pacific. Ageing population, rising incidence of chronic diseases with co-morbidities, high medical errors as well as unwanted medical visits and diagnostics procedures continue to increase the regional healthcare cost.

• About 25% of APAC population will be above 65 years by 2025

• Increasing number of patient with two and more chronic diseases. More than 60% of Asians above suffer from co-morbidities

• About 20-30% of hospital admissions above 65 in Australia are caused by medication errors

• On average, Asians visit at least 3 specialists for the same condition resulting in fragmented patient data

• Diagnostic errors rate in Japan is 30%

• Healthcare practices and treatment approaches vary widely across providers, organizations and countries in APAC.

However, for APAC the healthcare digitalization dream has been an uphill journey with various health systems having achieved distinct stages of maturity depending on each country’s industry needs such as improving overall health system efficiency, improving access to care, and providing quality healthcare services equivalent international standards, as well as driving medical tourism industry. Countries like Australia, Japan, South Korea and Singapore are leading the market while countries like India, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia are catching up fast in terms of digital adoption in healthcare industry.

Adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) has been increasing in the last two years and drives industry-wide profitability and benefits through further uptake.

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

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.