The last two years will be retrospectively regarded as the pivotal years of the existing generations. As we begin to see the cumulative effects and causality of the changes brought about by the pandemic, these years also mark our transition towards a series of new norms.
The largely established narrative is the realisation that we need to do things differently in many areas, from climate change awareness and deglobalisation to the reprioritisation of all aspects of healthcare. Healthcare strategies would require adjustments to emphasise public and preventive health, as well as mental health.
The emerging, ‘new’ healthcare model: Digital-first, remote and diverse
There is now a common understanding that the healthcare paradigm has truly shifted towards a model prioritising digitisation, where patient care is delivered close to or at home. This is especially so in the present times of accelerating nosocomial infections, which emphasises the need for social distancing and illustrates how hospital-based care cannot remain the same.
Care will move onto emerging healthcare platforms, with data being collected, collated, and stored in far more diverse and complex environments, which challenges traditional data infrastructure and healthcare IT. Existing formats of ‘digital’ healthcare, such as hospital-based systems, will also gradually be left behind.
The new mentality of innovation in the healthcare IT space would be focused on fostering an open and connected health ecosystem – be it on a local, regional, or global level. Openness, data-sharing, connectivity, and the robustness of cloud infrastructure would continue to be key for healthcare IT platforms.
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With FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) – a means of transmitting health data from one system to another through an application programming interface – gaining traction and adoption, such increased interoperability is expected to provide a new scale of efficiency to clinicians. Their access to real-time, harmonised information from across the care continuum can be streamlined, improving their overall care delivery to patients.
While this will all indeed take time, there is now an urgency to continue progress. Patients experiencing the new norm of healthcare prefer not to go back to the old way of receiving care, such as the shift from traditional ‘face-to-face’ healthcare to telehealth and virtual care. Patients may be less inclined to show up for in-person appointments, and some appointments will remain virtual.
The way healthcare is managed – from patient data collection through IoT devices or remote monitoring, to the way data is captured at the point of patient-provider interactions, and even the IT systems used – has evolved. IT systems will cease to be passive means for mere documentation.
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Instead, it will actively play a role in the management of clinical interactions, plus operational and financial decision-making for healthcare. It may potentially also be the fuel that drives management strategies and proactive public health policymaking.
The year ahead: Defining data ownership
What we foresee being of upcoming focus in 2022 and beyond is data ownership. There will be an observable shift in the way data ownership is going to be defined, where there will be more scrutiny and re-evaluation of the hands-off approach in which data is currently being handled.
In time to come, the value of data is expected to be better quantified. Healthcare data will be ‘owned’ by whoever generates the data – be it patients or healthcare providers. There will be major advances and strides taken in everything that touches data, from the push for its decentralisation, away from cloud-only narratives to zero-trust cybersecurity that will drive all data-centric decisions.
Ethics around data ownership and governance will take centre stage. The trust deficit will become the edifices of IT system architectures, with more emphasis increasingly paid to technologies such as data anonymisations and pseudonymisations.
Embedding digitalisation into the fabric of healthcare
The pandemic and the era of ‘uncertainty’ that has developed with it has challenged our existing frame of reference for digitalisation and had a perceptible effect on the status quo. Innovation, especially in the field of bio-convergence, is creating a wholly new shift in the way things are done and shaping the future of healthcare tech.
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With care being viewed in a more holistic sense than ever before and being expanded away from hospitals and into the community, this has had a profound effect on healthcare IT.
New patents can provide a sense of the technologies that are likely to gain a foothold in this decade. Many innovations of the last few years – from cloud computing, mobile ecosystems, IoT devices, robotics, distributed ledger technologies, and pervasive AI – are likely to gradually merge with advances in the fields of biotechnology, medicine, genomics, and neuroscience, forming a new frontier of digital health and data science. More than ever, the focus will be on the advent of true bioeconomy, with human healthcare at its very centre.
On the flip side of these advances, geopolitical tensions also raise key questions about the state of cybersecurity, data privacy and ethics, and data itself, as it becomes apparent that all innovation, including healthcare, is being tested by ethical and scientific barriers.
If data is indeed the new oil, the status quo is rapidly being challenged with the question: Who, in fact, owns data? Particularly in the healthcare sector – would this be the patient, the provider, the government, or even the multi-national stakeholders?
In Singapore, ownership has been placed in the hands of all major stakeholders where steps are collectively taken on the country’s healthcare advancement journey.
Technologies and tools from trusted partners are used at discretion and in adherence to data-ownership guidelines. Plans and policies around healthcare IT systems are being set in place and defined while keeping in mind cybersecurity and accompanying architectural considerations, data ethics, and legal requirements.
With a move towards working with ecosystem partners to carve out suitable platforms for the future, the nation’s progress in healthcare IT will be measured by its ability to adapt and react accordingly.
Dr Jan Ipe is a senior solutions architect at Allscripts (Asia)
