Healthcare digitalization in Taiwan
With tensions rising between Taiwan and China, we re-published last year’s episode about healthcare digitalization in Taiwan.
Taiwan spends only 6.4% of its GDP for healthcare, but has high satisfaction rates with healthcare, and is also very digitalized.
As explained by Yu.Chuan Jack Li, Editor-in-Chief for BMJ Health & Care Informatics journal, the elected president of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), the universal healthcare system in Taiwan triggered a movement toward digitalization already in the nineties, because 600 hospitals in 20,000 clinics around the country are required to submit insurance claims in the electronic pool. That triggered hospitals to install computer systems, not just for billing but also for patient care.
Taiwan achieved close to 90% adoption of its Electronic Medical Records System in its medical facilities and managed to transition from Stage 6 to Stage 7 as a nation in 2019 under the HIMSS Analytics Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM). However, Prof. Jack-Li warns that healthcare IT is underfunded and consequently vulnerable. “The banking industry invests about 10% of their revenue into their IT systems. In Taiwan, we invested only 1- 1.5% of the revenue into hospital IT systems, in the US it is about 3%, in the Europe they're aiming for 5%, but in most countries, most hospitals don't have that investment.”
Hospitals use different IT systems but are required to use common standards when sending the data out of the hospital. Taiwan also maintains a central repository of anonymized data for research. “It's under quite strict restrictions. When you go to the data center, you can’t bring anything with you. You can not bring your cell phone in. So if you go in there and you memorize what you're trying to do, you can access all the data in the data center. Then all the results have to go through a committee that approves that the research is not violating privacy or ethical concerns, in order to take the research results out of the center. When you go in there, the access you have is amazing. You have access to people’s health data for the last 25 years. That means 12 billion, 15 billion outpatient visits, hundreds of millions of inpatient stays and all of that, and it's a very big database, so it takes a lot of computing. This database alone supports the creation of about 1,200 papers every year,” explains Prof. Jack-Li.
Tune in to the full discussion below.
Other episodes in July
What Do Patients Really Think About Data? (EPF Congress 2022)
Europe has big plans for data access and cross-border sharing. by 2025, patients should have access to and control over their medical data regardless of where in Europe they are seeking medical care. That is the idea behind the European Health Data Space - the upcoming EU policy that aims to make patient data available to healthcare providers in a structured, standandardized way.
Many questions remain open: how can patients get control over their data, without this adding to the burden of disease management?
EIT Health Germany Series 6/12: Crowdfunding Doesn't Work for Healthcare and the Rise of Digital Visual Stress
One of the more prominent news in July was that according to Sifted and Dealroom, Healthtech seed investments in Europe surpassed Fintech investments in June, making healthtech industry the industry that’s attracting the most investments. At the same time, in the US, Rock Health reported that digital health startups in the US raised 10.3 billion USD in the first half year of 2022, and StartupHealth reported a lower amount of investments compared to 2021. As StartupHealth noted, the 16B raised globally in Q1 and Q2, is still much more than in the first half of the year 2020.
This episode reflects on the current investment situation in digital health and how the VC company aescuvest, which used to be a crowdfunding platform, invests in digital health startups. We also talk about the rising problem of digital visual stress and how Vivior developed a wearable sensor to decrease digital visual stress related problems.
Sleep and Digital Health in Brazil (Renata Redondo Bonaldi)
Don’t take your phone to bed. Just… don’t.
Best of 2021: (OVER)DOSE - How Can We Prevent Medication Errors and Patient Harm?
Unsafe medication practices and medication errors are a leading cause of injury and avoidable harm in health care systems across the world. Globally, the cost associated with medication errors has been estimated at $42 billion USD annually. Errors can occur at different stages of the medication use process. More than 237 million medication errors are made every year in England, the avoidable consequences of which cost the NHS upwards of £98 million and more than 1700 lives every year, indicate national estimates, published online in the journal BMJ Quality & Safety.
Watch or listen to our documentary that highlights clinical and patient aspects of medication safety with 10 speakers from 6 different countries across the world.
