Many projects and deployment of technologies in public healthcare are happening, but are taking place in silos.
This was the word from Dr Rajeev Rao Eashwari, director of e-health hospital services at the Gauteng Department of Health, talking about innovation within the public health sector.
He was speaking at the recently-held AWS 2022 Cloud Technology Series. Hosted by ITWeb, the hybrid event was the second instalment in the 2022 cloud series, with a focus on technology-enabled healthcare delivery.
Delivering the keynote address, Eashwari noted that as a clinician, he understands the pain-points that clinicians face and go through. Furthermore, he understands technology can be used to assist in making lives better for healthcare.
As a result, he believes there needs to be a central place for healthcare data to be archived and accessed as and when necessary.
“I think that’s what is important for us to understand about how technology can assist us,” he stated. “If we can have information available to us in real-time as clinicians, it will be first prize because we’ll be able to manage the patient better.”
Referencing Dr Rolan Christian, CEO of CareConnect, which created the Health Information Exchange (HIE) hub, Eashwari commented that “data needs to be democratised and made more accessible”.
He said CareConnect initiated the HIE hub, which brings the private sector together in collecting information.
However, as far as the public sector is concerned, a lot of data is available but only in silos. “A lot of things and projects are happening – it’s not that there’s nothing happening – but all the information either lies on the local servers or the service providers that provide different modalities like MRIs, etc. They have their own servers; they don’t talk to each other.
“What’s required going forward is to have a vendor-neutral cloud…that can assist us in getting all the information together and providing it to the end-user (the rural healthcare practitioner).”
The electronic vaccination data system, which serves as a centralised database of all the citizens that have been vaccinated in the country, will be the basis for the development of the National Health Insurance (NHI), noted the e-health director. “If we want NHI to succeed, we need citizen information.
“The creation of integrated digital platforms is key to what we are trying to achieve; we have to have a common platform that can assist us in integrating the digital platforms.”
Jean Pierre Horne, Amazon Web Services head of health services, also noted the largest opportunity that exists within the healthcare market is being able to predict healthcare events before they take place. Unlocking the power of data represents that opportunity, he stated.
“We’ve great ability to be able to use advancements within artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), to be able to get those data-driven insights to help improve patients’ outcomes.”
“We have these pre-built AI and ML models that interrogate the data and bring out the insights and analytics that forecasting is not able to see with the naked eye.”
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