99% of PH healthcare companies still use paper data

At a recent webinar on healthcare innovations organized by Globe Telecom, Inc., stakeholders expressed the need for the healthcare industry to utilize data archiving, sharing, and analysis through cloud technology in order to keep up with the demand for its services.

“99% of healthcare companies in the Philippines still uses paper data,” said Marnie Tolosa, senior partner development manager of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Philippines. 

Instead of laboriously reading over thousands of different papers, with each containing different data demographics, cloud services can extract relevant information for healthcare professionals to use.

Data that is late makes an impact on how healthcare providers operate, especially during a crisis. “It takes the whole ecosystem to actually serve this universe of customers,” said Tolosa.

This includes telemedicine, which Dr. Bu C. Castro, medical director of Bernardino General Hospital II, says is “extremely important during the pandemic.” 

There are digital technologies that already exist to make healthcare more efficient—AWS’s Amazon Comprehend Medical, for example, is a machine-learning algorithm that pulls out data based on specific categories. 

According to John Dave P. Dueñas, chief executive officer and Founder of HYBrain, a healthcare management software developer partnered with Globe Business, integrated systems may be difficult to set up but they are beneficial in the long run.

“Consumers increasingly expect seamless management of their information across their healthcare providers, from their doctors to their hospitals to their clinical laboratories to diagnostics and imaging, even up to their pharmacies,” said Dueñas 

Dueñas also noted that the healthcare industry’s shift towards value-driven organizations, which focus on the customers’ needs rather than the supply of a particular service, is feasible only if there is an integrated hospital information system available to doctors, their secretaries, the clinical labs, medical technologists, and pharmacies, etc.

He cited The Digital Healthcare Leap, a paper by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) published in 2017, to show the dilemma of deficit globally.

“The Philippines is predicted to have a 1.1 million deficit of hospital beds and a 1.2 million deficit of medical healthcare professionals by 2035,” he said, pointing out that this prediction was pre-pandemic and is now much more urgent.

Quoting the same paper, he said: “In the new digital health era, digitally enabled care is no longer going to be a nice-to-have, but rather a fundamental business imperative.”

SOURCE: Business World