The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic defined how the healthcare industry can benefit from the use of the right technology. Healthcare organizations turned to the cloud to quickly adapt to the disruptions brought about by the global health emergency, therefore driving innovation in telemedicine, digital health, medical research, and clinical care.
New technologies that had previously taken years to develop were completed and launched in weeks, if not days, using cloud computing. With the accelerated gains made in the last two years, the healthcare industry in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) can harness this momentum of digitization to address issues beyond the pandemic, like aging populations, increasing chronic disease prevalence, and the rising cost of healthcare.
Think tank ACCESS Health and AWS Institute — a thought leadership and executive education program for public sector executives from Amazon Web Services (AWS) — interviewed 39 policymakers, healthcare chief information officers (CIOs), chief medical informatics officers (CMIOs), and digital health experts in order to understand government and industry perspectives on cloud adoption for public healthcare. The findings are presented in the “Overcoming Barriers to Cloud Adoption in Public Healthcare in the Asia-Pacific” report released by the two organizations.
“Over the last two years, our customers, particularly in the healthcare sector, have had to respond to exceptional needs, urgent needs of their population to address the unfolding pandemic. AWS worked with them to leverage cloud technologies and enable them to experiment quickly, identify applications that would address the key problems that they face, and then scale very quickly in a very cost-effective manner,” according to Eric Conrad, Regional Managing Director – ASEAN, Public Sector at AWS during an online media briefing held this month.
The research, conducted in 12 countries across the Asia-Pacific-Japan region (Australia, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam), shows that government and healthcare leaders have an incredible opportunity to unleash further innovation in the healthcare industry by following three key steps: create clarity on cloud data governance regulations, develop strong cloud-first policies, and prioritize cloud skills training across the region.
Establishing Clarity in Healthcare Data Governance & a Cloud-First Policy
The cloud offers healthcare providers the agility to evolve rapidly, innovate, and reduce complexity in a scalable and cost-effective way. To set the path for a successful digitization journey, the report recommends that governments provide guidance for a policy framework that gives a clear direction to healthcare institutions and cloud solution providers that can assist with building compliant and secure healthcare technology solutions.
“In 2018, we migrated all our systems to the cloud. Prior to this 100% shift to the cloud, it takes 5 to 10 hours for a patient to be discharged. Now, it will not even take 10 minutes since everything is automated — all ancillaries are connected to one system. No more redundancy, and improved employees’ productivity by more than 60%,” said Jamie Dy, Vice-President for Information and Communications Technology, and Data Privacy Officer at Chinese General Hospital and Medical Center as he shared the hospital’s digital transformation journey at the same online media briefing.
The latest report from ACCESS Health and AWS Institute recommends that governments consider using a range of policy tools to enhance the digital health data ecosystem, particularly clear and accountable data governance policies. This involves implementing principle-based- and risk-based regulatory frameworks, with clear and consistent standards that are based on internationally recognized standards, a focus on outcomes, and guidance on how they can be applied to healthcare data. Such frameworks are particularly important as they give confidence to healthcare institutions, providers, and patients to use digital and cloud-based solutions. For countries with national data security and privacy regulations already in place, policymakers can accelerate innovation with more clarity and proactive guidance on how such regulations apply to healthcare data. The report also recommends that healthcare agencies create a patient-centered, connected healthcare system by establishing policy frameworks with open standards for secure data interoperability and data exchange that allow IT systems and services to create, exchange, and consume healthcare data securely.
Other policy tools that governments can tap to realize the full potential of the cloud include digital transformation incentive measures, and clear cloud procurement policies.
Closing the Digital Skills Gap in Healthcare
To complement the cloud-first policy and digitization roadmap, the report recommends a need for healthcare workers across all levels, in technical and non-technical roles, to fully understand the benefits of digitization and have the skills to leverage the cloud. The report shows that the general understanding of cloud services in the healthcare industry is limited, impacting the adoption of cloud services across the region’s health systems. Respondents also cited the perceived cost of cloud migration in terms of planning, implementation, and the training of IT staff and clinicians as a major barrier for public healthcare organizations with already strained budgets.
To enable transformative innovation across the healthcare sector, governments need to work with industry to implement educational programs and training to upskill the workforce and to design and build human-centric digital health applications. To accelerate the digitization drive, governments should empower a designated body to boost capacity building and drive digital initiatives in partnership with the private sector. Training in cloud technology can also improve organizational efficiency. A survey of AWS customers found that 90% of organizations that employed AWS Certified staff saw an increase in productivity, while 86% reported improved security of cloud workloads after their staff became AWS Certified.
Benefits & Security Capabilities of the Cloud
Research respondents in the report also shared that due to a lack of awareness or understanding of the cloud, policymakers and healthcare leaders have misconceptions about the security and the privacy of cloud-based data. The cloud is secure and can open up opportunities for digital transformation for healthcare systems in APJ. Increased cloud skills training can help to address this gap in understanding the benefits and security capabilities of the cloud.
AWS is diligently focused on the security needs of our customers, including the healthcare sector, in every location in which it operates. This includes achieving global certifications and local accreditations (such as Information Security Registered Assessors Program, or IRAP PROTECTED in Australia, and Information System Security Management and Assessment Program, or ISMAP in Japan) that provide comprehensive reliability, security, and data privacy. AWS provides customers with the ability to securely store, manage, and manipulate large health data sets, which has been vital for advancing medical research and the growing need for quality health analytics.
AWS supports many healthcare organizations globally by providing the technology needed to move at the speed necessary to have an impact — from using medical data-sharing to diagnose previously unknown diseases to identifying new viruses to prevent another pandemic, and many other critical functions — all while enabling customers to meet the highest security and compliance requirements. As one example, the Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS) in Singapore, the agency responsible for supplying the enabling technologies that power Singapore public healthcare, turned to AWS to securely scale its vaccination operations IT systems to sustain significantly higher loads at very short notice, from an initial load of 8,000 daily vaccinations to a peak of 80,000 daily vaccinations within four weeks.
Continuing the Momentum of Innovation in Healthcare
A strong collaboration between governments and the private sector can smooth the journey to the cloud for public healthcare. Together, the public sector and private organizations can propel wider cloud adoption and unleash even more innovation by better educating the public, training workers, and implementing digital strategies that leverage cloud technology for the good of all citizens. The lessons we have learned from rapid digitization during the pandemic can provide incredible opportunities to harness this momentum and take immediate action to help the healthcare industry continue to transform.