Pim Preesman
Jakarta ●
Mon, September 19, 2022
The global pandemic has accelerated digital transformation in healthcare, highlighting the urgent need for interoperability between IT systems confronted with a deluge of patient data – often fragmented and isolated between different specialties, departments and locations. According to a McKinsey Global Report, such inefficiencies have cost hospitals over $300 billion in value each year.
This year, Philips’ 2022 Future Health Index surveyed 3,000 healthcare leaders in 15 countries, including Indonesia, and found that the most pressing issue facing healthcare leaders is employee satisfaction and retention, which is what in a sector , faced with a variety of labor shortage becomes a challenging task.
Another urgent priority for healthcare leaders is to continue to expand healthcare delivery beyond hospital walls by investing in technologies such as digital health records, telemedicine, and artificial intelligence tools that can increase efficiencies, improve care, and connect distant communities, which can be built upon on the progress made during the pandemic.
The report also said that Indonesian healthcare leaders say their top investment priorities over the next three years will be in both AI (82 percent vs. 38 percent now) and telemedicine (49 percent vs. 37 percent today). Almost half (47 percent) of Indonesian healthcare leaders are investing in digital health records, with another 44 percent prioritizing clinical operations centers.
Both numbers are well above the global average of 39 and 22 percent, respectively.
Digitization is crucial to drive the adoption of more sustainable healthcare models. A digital health ecosystem will greatly expand access to health care, especially for underserved communities in remote, hard-to-reach areas. Digital solutions are particularly scalable, which supports the shift away from patient care towards prevention and healthy living. The cost per treatment will also decrease, which will have a positive impact on the rising healthcare costs that many countries around the world are struggling with.
Against this background, the Indonesian government has started a digital transformation of its healthcare system. It recently unveiled a comprehensive digital health blueprint that lays the foundation for the country to leverage digital healthcare to provide universal, affordable, and equitable quality care to all Indonesians. The growth of the digital health ecosystem is also expected to improve Indonesia’s preparedness to deal with pandemic and epidemic situations in the future.
Indonesia has 37 provinces from Sabang to Merauke, with each province having its own state. In order to provide healthcare professionals and patients in different regions with equal access to digital transformation, the government must prioritize the development of standardized infrastructure and resources across Indonesia.
In addition, the other major challenge is the management of national health data. Today, fragmented data spread across different applications in the healthcare sector, as well as standardization and data sharing regulations are the order of the day. The PeduliLindendi app, for example, currently has more than 95 million users and has the potential to be transformed into a holistic citizen health app.
Currently, the Indonesian government has six pillars of Indonesia’s healthcare system to be digitally transformed, namely primary care, secondary care, healthcare system resilience, healthcare financing, healthcare talent and culture, and healthcare digitalization and technology.
In order to realize the vision for a healthy Indonesia, stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem must support and collaborate with the Ministry of Health. The ministry has mentioned some of the expected challenges along this transformation path in its digital transformation plan – such as .
Private sectors in the health technology industry experienced in collaborating with and delivering digital transformation journeys for public actors around the world can support governments by providing their expertise to improve access to care outside of Java, improve access to comprehensive care throughout Indonesia and a continuum of care for key disease areas such as cardiology, neurology and oncology.
For example, based on previous similar incidents in our company around the world, we plan to establish command centers so that four command centers across Indonesia can provide a continuum of care in cardiology, radiology, digital pathology and critical care and address the issue of access and interoperability.
Such command centers can provide seamless access to data and efficient clinical workflows to facilitate collaboration between the cardiovascular teams between a cardiac-focused main hospital and selected mid-level hospitals. Strategically placed command centers can remotely support oncology, neurology and other workflows, provide advanced visualization (AV) and digital computer pathology (DCP) capabilities, and provide a virtual care center.
To help the government enable healthcare data interoperability, healthcare technology companies can help by implementing standardized solutions that allow healthcare providers to access patient data generated from multi-modality, multi-vendor, multi-hospital, and multi-site visits disease path of the patient.
We believe that the digital transformation of healthcare and the increasing adoption of virtual care or “telemedicine” will play an important role in helping people live healthy lives and cope with disease in the future, and to enable healthcare providers to meet people’s healthcare needs with better outcomes and improved productivity.
Using the command center’s hub-and-spoke model can also help facilitate specialized remote consultations, where a specialist can monitor up to 150 to 200 patients with high acute acuity while being supported by three nurses. Centralized training of healthcare professionals across Indonesia through these hubs can ensure an equitable standard of care for all patients.
I can say that our long-term vision is to enable transformations that can extend care beyond the hospital walls. We understand the need for integrated computing solutions capable of seamlessly connecting patients and caregivers in real time, from the hospital to anywhere.
Together with the leading healthcare providers in Indonesia, we must work hand-in-hand to “drive better patient outcomes” to meet people’s health needs, achieve better outcomes and increase productivity.
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The author is President Director of PT Philips Indonesia Commercial.
