To Make Digital Health Possible Is “To Make Health Data Transferable”

Digital Health is not a new concept. It could be as simple as a mobile app for video calling with doctors. However, in the face of global concerns for pandemics or the racial discrimination on access to healthcare, digital health continues to grow and evolve.

HANOI, Vietnam--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The growing importance of Digital Health has recently been discussed in a webinar “Innovative Digital Solutions For Future Healthcare”, with the participation of the leading experts from FPT Software, who spend decades of experience developing digital healthcare solutions.

Simply put, Digital Health refers to the application of digital technologies to the healthcare field. These technologies assist healthcare workers in making better-informed and more data-driven decisions. With the advances in AI, big data, robotics and machine learning, Digital Health continues to bring about major changes for the healthcare system on a global scale.

To illustrate this, Dr. Pham Tri Cong, AI Scientist & Data Program Leader at FPT Software took akaMedic as an example. akaMedic is an AI-based application that uses deep learning and computer vision to continuously analyse cancer signals. akaMedic can help detect cancer signals in the very early stage with “the accuracy rate is as high as 95%” - Dr Cong said.

Health data helps us understand a lot more than what we used to about personal health situations. The amount of health data is now massive and keeps proliferating as it comes from various sources like fitness apps and gadgets, home genome test kits and electronic health records.

However, health data are typically scattered across various hospitals and healthcare facilities. According to Harvard Business Review, “Large chunks of most people’s medical histories are lost to any useful purpose when they move or change doctors because getting their information transferred is too complicated.”

"Many health systems are still struggling to share information to each other, even when they use the same electronic health record software," Mr. Tran Dinh Cung, Business Unit Leader of Healthcare Data Platform and Pharma, FPT Software considered.

Therefore, to make digital health possible is “to make health data transferable," Mr Cung emphasised. Otherwise, this would cause inefficiencies, loss of time and effort which ultimately lead to the delay in treatment.

To better understand this situation, here’s an all-too-common scenario shared by Mr. Nguyen Trung Hieu, Director of Digital Health SME, FPT Software:

A patient called the emergency line. Paramedics came, inspected the patient and identified his health status. But the evaluation process repeated as the patient arrived at the hospital. "The patient should have received more prompt treatment if information on their health status and the first aid actions taken by the ambulance team were exchanged with the hospital while he was delivering to the hospital." Mr Hieu said.

“These small failures with big consequences are everywhere in the global health care system, costing years of healthy life and billions of dollars in avoidable treatment costs”, John Glaser wrote on Harvard Business Review.

To prevent the loss, what we need is “a detailed instruction manual outlining data formats and allowable values for each resource or type of data to be exchanged,” Mr Cung argued. He recommended using Health Level Seven International®, HL7®, a standard for exchanging healthcare information electronically, founded in 1987, and currently has more than 500 corporate and organisational members.

With a strong set of implementation guides and an easy access to health data no matter where and when it was generated, a patient can access their own data to learn more about their health and take better-informed actions; healthcare professionals can analyse those datasets to find patterns in their patient populations, and researchers can use those data to discover and evaluate new drugs and therapies.

Watch the full episode here: facebook.com/fptsoftware.official/videos/827777101977280