Health is an important asset in the development of human capital in any nation. A healthy workforce is fundamental to the contribution of a well-functioning economy. This is evidently reflected in every government’s significant spending on healthcare.

In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, healthcare will account for 50% of governmental spending by 2011 and two-thirds by 2017. In China, 39% of the rural population and 36% of the urban population cannot afford professional medical treatment despite the success of the country’s economic and social reforms over the past 25 years. In Malaysia, 85% of the population relies on the government for healthcare and treatment in public clinics and hospitals.

In our globally connected world, a disease that starts in one part of it can spread more quickly than ever before. Many of us will still remember the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak. Within a matter of weeks in early 2003, SARS had spread from Hong Kong and the Guangdong province of China to as far off as Canada, Slovenia, the UK and to Malaysia and Singapore. It was the first severe infectious disease to emerge in the 21st century that posed a serious threat to global health security, the livelihood of populations, the functioning of health systems and the stability and growth of economies.

In fact, the outbreak almost paralysed our hospitality industry. A survey conducted by the Labour Department covering 120 hotels throughout the country then showed that 50% of them recorded poor occupancy rates due to a significant reduction in tourist arrivals. Hotels in Langkawi only recorded 20% occupancy while hotels in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur recorded a drop from 65% to about 33%.

Our global healthcare systems are not equipped to cope because, for one, they are not well connected. They are in silos separated by a gulf of languages and proprietary standards. By 2010, 30% of the data stored on the world’s computers will be medical images. The trouble is, all of that information is trapped and disconnected. Just getting information from one place to another can be a painful experience.

Other common issues include rising costs, limited access, high error rates, lack of coverage, poor response to chronic disease and the lengthy development cycle for new medicines. Most of these could be improved if we could link together diagnosis, drug discovery, healthcare providers, insurers, employers, patients and communities. Today, these components, processes and participants that comprise the vast healthcare system are not connected. Duplication and handoffs are rampant. Deep wells of lifesaving information are inaccessible.

A long-awaited reform of national healthcare systems worldwide is imperative. Countries such as the US and China are making tremendous investments to rescue their healthcare delivery systems. In the US, some US$19 billion (RM69.3 billion) has been earmarked to drive adoption of health information technology nationwide. Eclipsing that amount is China’s pledge of US$124 billion for healthcare reforms to provide universal, accessible and affordable medical coverage to the country’s 1.3 billion people.

In this respect, one of Malaysia’s strategic goals under the Ninth Malaysia Plan (2006-2010) is to strengthen the health information management system, enhance the healthcare delivery system and improve the health status of Malaysians. This includes improving connectivity, upgrading the standards of information and communications technology as well as health informatics, improving and consolidating health information management and facilitating evidence-based decision-making.

The economic stimulus packages announced in the countries present an opportunity for health systems to think and act in new ways. A smarter healthcare system starts with better connections, better data and faster and more detailed analysis. It means integrating our data and centering it on the patient, so each person “owns” his information and has access to a networked team of collaborative care. It means moving away from paper records in order to reduce medical errors and improve efficiencies. And it means applying advanced analytics to vast amounts of data to improve outcomes.

Smarter healthcare is instrumented, so our health systems can automatically capture accurate, real-time information. In 2007, the Ministry of Health (MOH) introduced and implemented MOH Cube — leveraging open source software to reduce cost and increase module flexibility and security.

The ministry saved over RM5 million in licensing costs alone. With MOH Cube, emails can be accessed via various mediums — the web, handphones or PDAs. Besides providing email capability, MOH Cube comprises news, calendaring, e-learning as well as document management. The system is being used by over 30,000 people in MOH, including all its agencies, 135 hospitals, district health centres, health clinics and dentistry and nursing colleges.

Meanwhile, IBM’s joint initiative with Google Health and the Continua Health Alliance enables individuals and families to store and track their health information and stream data from medical devices. Implanet, a French orthopaedics manufacturer, is using radio frequency identification technology to track surgical implants from manufacture until they are inside patients, while healthcare providers in Denmark are using predictive health systems with advanced telemetry to monitor elderly patients in their homes, sharing data instantly.

Smarter healthcare is interconnected, so doctors, patients and insurers can all share information seamlessly and efficiently. Sainte-Justine, a research hospital in Quebec, is automating the gathering, managing and updating of critical research data, which is often spread across different departments. They are applying analytics to speed up childhood cancer research and expect a 90% reduction in time. At the same time, they are drastically lowering the cost of data acquisition by about 75% as well as enhancing data quality.

Servicio Extremeño de Salud, a public healthcare service in Spain, has built a regionally integrated system that lets patients go to many health centres within the region, knowing a doctor there can have their complete, up-to-date records for faster and more accurate treatment. The organisation took steps to create a global platform, connecting almost 13,000 professionals with a scheduling system that manages nine million outpatient visits a year.

Smarter healthcare is intelligent, applying advanced analytics to improve research, diagnosis and treatment. Geisinger Health Systems is integrating clinical, financial, operational, claims, genomic and other information into an integrated environment of medical intelligence that helps doctors deliver more personalised care. This enables them to make smarter decisions and deliver higher quality care, all because they can easily turn information into actionable knowledge.

Guang Dong Hospital of China Medicine is implementing the Clinical and Health Records Analytics and Sharing (CHAS) project — the first of its kind — to apply healthcare information sharing and analytics technologies, thus  enabling the hospital to efficiently process information. This is despite two radically different approaches to medicine in China: traditional Chinese medicine and modern Western medicine. By integrating health records that combine Eastern and Western medicine into one standardised system and applying sophisticated analytics, CHAS can provide a way for healthcare practitioners to more deeply understand which treatment plans and techniques from each approach work best for specific diseases and medical conditions. 

IBM is helping some of the world’s top universities develop a global network of medical data, giving doctors diagnostic resources that were once unimaginable, and is leading the World Community Grid, a network of thousands of people and computers that work together on healthcare and humanitarian problems.

Technology alone cannot cure what ails us. But it can help those who treat our illnesses heal our injuries and find new and better ways to battle diseases. It can also help healthy individuals to make smarter choices about their health and care.

Smarter healthcare systems like these hold promise beyond their particular communities, patients and diseases. The smart ideas from one can be replicated across an increasingly efficient, interconnected and intelligent system. This should result in lower costs, better quality care and healthier people and communities. In other words, we will have a true healthcare system, with its focus on the right place — a nation working together for a healthier and smarter Malaysia.

Ou Shian Waei is managing director of IBM Malaysia. This is the fifth of an eight-part series on Building a Smarter Planet by IBM.



This article appeared in The Edge Malaysia, Issue 752, April 27-May 3, 2009