Five Technological Developments That Will Change Healthcare In The Asia-Pacific Region

Frost & Sullivan recently issued a health industry analysis stating that five major technological developments would transform healthcare delivery in the Asia-Pacific region over the next decade.

Cloud computing and cloud services are currently used by about 30 percent of Asia-Pacific healthcare providers. Many CIOs say that they plan to incorporate cloud migration into their IT budgets. Concerns remain, however, over data security and potential problems with business continuity.

The most common means of communication for healthcare providers in the Asia-Pacific region continue to be pagers and mobile phones. However, as public sector healthcare spending continues to increase along with public-private partnerships, more providers will adopt cloud computing and services.

Big data analytics is the second technology that Frost & Sullivan predicts will transform the region. Between now and 2018, the research organization expects revenue from business analytics for healthcare providers to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 10.9 percent.IDC Health predicts that Asia-Pacific providers will start to utilize this data for secondary uses such as epidemiology, quality testing and research.

Electronic medical record (EMR) adoption and the transition to remote and mobile patient monitoring will cause the volume of medical and health data generated to grow by units of terabytes. Healthcare organizations will have to use analytics systems and intelligence tools to manage and utilize this data.

Another major development, advanced imaging, is addressing both preventive and diagnostic medical care. In addition to spending on advanced imaging equipment, both public and private players must create courses to help doctors and radiologists learn to properly use the equipment.

M2M technology will allow providers to continuously monitor physiological signals, analyze the data and transmit it to stakeholders and devices in real-time. In addition to converged infrastructure, important technologies for M2M include Bluetooth, RFID, motion sensing and wireless networking.

Finally, Frost & Sullivan predicts a major emergence of social media in the healthcare sphere. Online portals, live chats, forums, communities and panels help physicians to exchange information with government bodies and with communities.

To properly utilize social media, physicians in the Asia-Pacific region will have to figure out how to structure the data that they obtain from social media sources. Then, the data can be used to improve healthcare delivery.