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Africa: Health IT on the Rise in the Middle East and Africa |
| Source: |
Google Alert |
| Source Date: |
Wednesday, March 05, 2014 |
| Focus: |
ICT for MDGs
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| Created: |
Mar 05, 2014 |
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Health ICT becomes the most important part to deliver the transformation to integrated care. Patient information management becomes essential in this transformation. The journey towards personalised care and personalised medicine increases the importance of IT.
“Hospitals will have increased budget for innovation to introduce new technologies that eventually will provide better care. Health insurance or payers will receive reduced bills as care could be better coordinated due to patient information availability,” Mahmoud Mounir, director of Information Intelligence Group for Turkey, Emerging Africa and Middle East at EMC, told Khaleej Times in an interview. EMC’s major focus is on Digital assets and “Integrated Care” healthcare solutions. The company’s solutions will ensure the future sustainability of service delivery by coordinating all players across the value chain, including hospitals, primary care, community care, private clinics, public health authorities, payers, life-science organisations, and, last but not least, patients, according to Mounir.
The latest IDC survey confirms that healthcare providers are interested in innovation and ready to invest, he said, adding: “Our innovative solution will release IT budgets that currently spent on integration and migration to be shifted to innovation for the benefit of the patient.”
With an integrated-care delivery mindset, less mistakes are made, a continuous and coordinated care provided and a complete understanding of cost achieved as coordinate care providers have a clear understanding of the overall process and their cost, Mounir said, adding: “That becomes an opportunity to improve the cost structure such as creation of specialised cost effective care delivery units.”
He said costs will be dramatically reduced on the ICT side as the new patient information management model will put a stop to the current common system where data is locked within the application that generates patient data and any act of modernisation and innovation demands costly migration. “We have already demonstrated cases where many applications have been interacting on the basis of patient data and not point-to-point integration as it commonly seen today. That fact will drive out a significant amount of cost and will enable care organisation to focus on innovations,” he explained.
EMC has been delivering enterprise content management systems to many industries since mid-1990s, he said, adding: “The big investment we have done in the past few years was to adapt our technology to the healthcare world by embossing healthcare protocols as HL7, Dicom and XDS, and we keep working to be in the edge of the innovation. With the new shift that requires significant scale to able to manage patient data on a hospital, regional or national level, EMC has a unique solution to manage a complete patient data regardless size or nature and apply all patent information life cycle to protect, manage and share this data.”
To date, most healthcare providers have made IT investments to establish the foundation for collaborative care — the digitisation and sharing of healthcare data across caregivers involved in a patient care episode. They’ve deployed transactional systems including EMRs, operational, revenue cycle management and financial systems. Yet, the vast majority of the growing amounts of medical data is coming from unstructured and semi-structured data found in Pacs and medical imaging, clinical research, doctors’ notes, pathology reports and more.
“Now, more than ever, healthcare providers require solutions that analyse data from many sources across the continuum of care and provide actionable insights to meet the clinical and business demands of the ever-changing healthcare industry,” he explained.
He added that in the new era, with a shift to patient-centric integrated-care delivery, where interoperability looks much easier to manage, IT will be challenged with new challenges as how to scale cloud-provisioned integrated patient information systems, managing patient consent and patient data security and ability get wisdom out of big data analytics while manage extremely large files produced by the genome research and pathology.
— abdulbasit@khaleejtimes.com
For more news from Khaleej Times, follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/khaleejtimes, and on Twitter at @khaleejtimes
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Africa: Health IT on the Rise in the Middle East and Africa Hospitals will have increased budget for innovation to introduce new technologies that eventually will provide better care More than 50 per cent hospital executives expect to see their organisation’s total IT budget is increasing in 2014 in the Middle East and Africa according to a latest study jointly conducted by EMC and IDC The research indicates that hospitals will need to look beyond their borders to deliver improved and cost-effective patient care in an environment where long-term chronic illness is on the increase Today’s healthcare organisations are investing in new solutions and technologies to move toward — meaningful use of the electronic health record and to engage in accountable care and — pay for performance initiatives
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