6.2 DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF HEALTH
Significant technical and structural inefficiencies plague the world’s health systems, but by enabling policies that ease digital health innovation and encourage investment, we can create space for integrated digital strategies that deliver better health care
indicators. It is entirely possible for those managing the highway to share data on performance, bottlenecks, inefficiencies, design issues and the efficacy of interventions without compromising the privacy of vehicle owners. Similarly, although health data itself is private, such that unrestricted public access is not advisable, there should be no such restrictions on data about the efficiency and costs of healthcare processes. Yet there is tremendous resistance to transparency in healthcare system processes, despite the common knowledge that healthcare errors are a leading cause of adverse patient outcomes. Given the burgeoning costs and declining patient satisfaction globally, there is an urgent need to
By Anurag Agrawal, dean, Biosciences and Health Research, Trivedi School of Biosciences, Ashoka University
T he major health system non-interoperable data silos and structural problems, with different goals and mandates among the various actors. Effective health care requires an effective flow of people, services and associated information through a streamlined sequence of processes. The digital transformation in health care promises to enhance our ability to generate, manage and use such information through information technology and big data analytics. Using the analogy of an information highway, the health informatics challenge extends beyond admitting and collecting tolls from individual vehicles to innovatively measuring traffic flow and other performance challenges are a mix of technical problems, leading to fragmented
A plague on health systems
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Health: A Political Choice – From Fragmentation to Integration
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