Redefining healthcare in Asia through technology

With the cost of healthcare in Singapore expected to rise to $13 billion in 2020, Dr. Elton Ong, managing director of Fullerton Healthcare, offers ideas for technological solutions to optimise the sector.

Healthcare systems in Asia are under tremendous pressure.

Demand is increasingly driven by population growth, and the impact of chronic diseases is driving cost upwards, increasing the burden on already strained public health systems.

In Singapore alone, the cost of healthcare is expected to rise from $9 billion today to $13 billion in 2020.

To ensure populations across the region have access to high quality and affordable healthcare, providers, both private and public,will need to reimagine their approach to healthcare, placing innovation at the heart of the transformation.

Technology driving transformation

Today, we find ourselves at the convergence of technology and healthcare, with technology-driven trends propelling a fundamentally different approach to medical challenges.

For example, the ability to aggregate, sort and analyse large amounts of data is helping doctors better treat patients, design more streamlined clinical trials and speed the discovery of new medicines.

Through an explosion in mobile technology, patients are now able to use healthcare apps, such as fitness trackers and cholesterol monitors, to take ownership of their healthcare destinies like never before.

The intersection of healthcare and technology isn’t just about detecting and treating diseases, it’s also removing inefficiencies from a profoundly inefficient industry.

At both the clinical and administrative level, technology is streamlining back-end processes and improving the patient and client experience at the front-end.

While technology has the ability to solve healthcare problems on a grand scale such as the ability to predict health outcomes and detect and treat diseases, technology also has the ability to improve the day to day of healthcare ultimately improving the patient experience and driving down costs.

How Fullerton is leveraging on this development

At Fullerton Healthcare, we believe in relentless innovation and are leveraging technology throughout our business to deliver world-class medical services to our clients and patients we serve.

To ensure our products and service offering remains best-in-class, we are constantly investing in technology to make the patient experience easier, quicker and better.

For example, Fullerton Healthcare was one of the first companies in the industry to digitize x-rays, providing doctors and patients quick and easy access to results that can be read via smartphones.

At RadLink (a Fullerton Healthcare diagnostic and imaging provider) patients are now able to benefit from state-of-the-art scanning equipment which isn’t available anywhere else in the region.

This commitment to technology innovation also underpins the way we service our clients.

Our IT team develops in-house IT infrastructure and proprietary tools, such as email management and performance tracking systems, that allow us to automate processes and improve our customer experience and service delivery - the benefits of which are passed on to clients and patients.

To further underscore the importance of technology to Fullerton Healthcare, we recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft, through which we bring together our respective capabilities.

The implementation of technology is a journey, and while we’ve taken great strides there is much work that needs to be done across the industry to ensure patients are provided with the highest level of care.

By investing in technology and innovation, we as an industry can make healthcare in Asia, better together.

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