Digital Health and Opportunities

Technology is evolving at a very high pace, and this evolution brings a lot of opportunities and challenges in Health Industry. Though it is a fascinating time with many e-health initiatives by Commonwealth and State governments such as My Health Record, the rapid adoption of cloud-based services opens a door for digital health in Australia.

Over the year, both the Primary and  Acute care sector focused on EMR system with minimum to no integration or information sharing outside the organisation. These systems helped organisations better manage their patients or clients (and fulfil Govt. reporting requirements) but did not benefit a service recipient. Once the patient leaves the service provider's door, the only communication left is Fax’s, referrals, letters (which we digitised as we love adopting technologies), thus leaving a massive gap between Primary and Acute Care.  

Leveraging the existing investment in Health Technologies, it's time to start looking at digital health.

Note: This diagram may have used symbols of a few known applications/ systems, but this model quite agnostic.   

Though this architecture can be implemented within an organisation or health system, the real opportunity is to build a common Integration, Data Lake, Analytics and Machine Learning platform. Below are a few of the opportunities and challenges with this approach   

Opportunities

Early Detection and Prevention

Machine learning can be used on some common dataset (may include some demographic information, symptoms, treatment, of course, without personal data to analyse, detect and prevent different epidemics. It will be more effective when this is applied to centralised data. It can save many lives and would allow authorities to stop the widespread. This is just one example, as it will open many opportunities. 

Need-based Investment

Data analytics will allow the authorities to identify the needs of each area for a better distribution of Tax dollars in the Health Sector.

Common Services Platform

With the use of Microservices, many standard services such as Address Verification, SMS and Reminders, Medicare, My Health Records, Pathology and Lab reports can be managed centrally, and security delivers these services to different applications. Yes, we are doing a lot of this today, but a common platform will reduce a cost for each individual agency. 

Single Pane of Glass

It may not be relevant for the acute sector. Still, data analytics on Social media feeds could bring significant value to primary care services such as Mental Health, Suicide Prevention, Gambling support and others.

Hybrid Cloud

It's not far when major public clouds will be certified for Protected Data (based on ASD certification). This means it’s the right time to do POC for the migration of applications in the cloud. Keeping the cost factor aside the baggiest benefit of well-architected IaaS or PaaS services will reduce the project time by many folds. The tedious procurement process that span over month and months can be reduced to days (Planning off course)

Challenges

Identity and Access Management

With the adoption of Cloud, Integration and Collaboration, Identity and access management becomes a big challenge. According to the research, 64% of all data breaches in the first half of 2016 are related to identity theft, with 27% only in Health.

Secure access and identity management are paramount for digital adoption.

Data / Individual Privacy

Privacy laws may require some review and alignment to allow sharing information,  social media ingestion and correlation etc.

What do you think where does the opportunity exist that help builds a healthier community?