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Healthcare
How will technology change the future of healthcare?
By Robin Hicks | 1 September 2009

The future does not bear thinking about for many healthcare practitioners in Asia, which is faced with the world’s fastest ageing population. FutureGov asked a group of experts for their views on how technology could clear a safer path for the sector.

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Pascal Tse, CIO, St Teresa’s Hospital, Hong Kong Health IT is going to shape the health delivery process globally. Health IT can start as simply as taking a phone call to a doctor, up to building a seamlessly integrated healthcare workflow. On the one hand, IT functions as an enabler in delivering faster and more accurate medical information to end users and at the same time reducing the manual labour-intensive process. An example is the use of the Computer Physicians Order Entry (CPOE) system that helps doctors to order different laboratory tests and prescribe medication for patients.

Associate Prof Dr Low Cheng Ooi, Chairman of the Medical Board, Changi General Hospital, Singapore The convergence of broadband penetration into homes and the emergence of more sophisticated portable medical devices is creating an opportunity for harnessing innovative technology to push the point of healthcare delivery to the home. Telemonitoring and videoconferencing with care co-ordinators will enable the management of patients with chronic diseases away from the acute care setting.

Prof. K. Ganapathy, President, Apollo Telemedicine Networking Foundation, India Trained in the BC era (Before Computers!) it is mind boggling for me to see how simple history-taking, and clinical examinations have given way to technology, and more technology still. In the second decade of the 21st century, clinical intuition may even be challenged by expert systems armed with Artificial Intelligence. It is impossible to expect the clinician be familiar with the nuances of every piece of technology he is using. Technology is a double-edged sword and clinical judgement becomes even more important.

Dr Goh Zenton, CEO, Cadi Scientific One of the key challenges in the future of healthcare will be how to deal with an ageing population. A worldwide phenomenon, the ageing population is going to result in a higher patient to nurse ratio. Technology will probably never be able to replace a doctor’s judgment or a nurse’s touch. But it can help tip the balance by improving workflow and making manual and routine tasks more efficient. The automation of tasks such as temperature taking will free up time for other nursing tasks. Also, with a rapid decrease in hardware size and increase in mobility and connectivity, doctors will always be in the know.

Dr Chong Yoke Sin, CEO, Integrated Health Information Systems, Singapore IT will re-define healthcare. Most of us are moving towards an electronic health record (EHR) system that unifies patients’ records. But the new-era EHR will provide the clinician with systems that could dispense the course of action through analysis of the past history and the assessment of the present health issue. Doctors should be able to focus on making real decisions that require human judgment aided by IT. Standards such as the ICD-10 and Snomed will be used pervasively, and clinicians will become familiar with codifying diagnoses and procedures since the language of healthcare will be universal. This provides for great opportunities for the globalisation of healthcare where records could also be retrieved from a foreign country where the patient seeks treatment. Common standards and terminology will make this possible.

Dr Wong Merng Koon, Co-Director for Trauma Service, Singapore General Hospital Technology will increasingly be deployed right next to clinical care and the patient in a number of ways. Using biometrics, RFID, and barcode to establish patient identity before treatment administration. Bedside clinical information displays to keep patients engaged in their own care. Computer navigation via integration of a multitude of medical imaging datasets through the real-time display of anatomy during surgery. This will be taken further via telemedicine, head up displays and haptics feedback technologies. Knowledge bases will increasingly be deployed to bring about best evidence healthcare. Evidence-based driven guidelines will bring about rule-based diagnosis and treatment. Algorithm-driven diagnosis is already well tried and tested and will be implemented in EMR to bring about cost-effective diagnosis and increasingly, the same will apply to the treatment of chronic diseases.

Melvin Choi, CIO, Adventist Health, Hong Kong Technology is one of the catalysts for changing the future of healthcare. However, changing this cannot be achieved by technology alone. Harmonisation between standards bodies is also essential. Take IT, for example. One can be easily drowned in the ocean of health IT standards and standards bodies. Besides technology, the other two essential components for any system in today’s world are organisation direction and people engagement. With direction from the top of an organisation, any endeavour will have a better chance of becoming a reality. A good example is the direction that President Obama gives on IT as a critical part of the country’s health reform. People, including both healthcare providers and consumers, must also be engaged in the game from the very beginning of any project. Then the outcome will have a better chance to benefit all parties.

Ron Emerson, Global Director of Healthcare, Polycom Few people realise that the healthcare industry led the way in implementing wireless voice communications. Hospitals were the earliest adopters of this technology. The system integration of wireless voice communications with other applications like voice recognition, telemetry, patient monitoring alarms and real-time location tracking will allow hospitals to streamline their communications structure. This should have the effect of cutting response times, improving information flow between patients and caregivers and overall patient care. Interactive communications tools have evolved to help the healthcare industry tackle real-world challenges such as the need to extend geographical reach to provide healthcare in remote areas, deployment of healthcare professional resources and the reduction of operating costs.