Dr Fathema Djan Rachmat, president director of the Indonesia Healthcare Corporation (IHC), said Indonesia still faces challenges in data interoperability; the need to ensure healthcare access for Indonesians across all socioeconomic backgrounds; care model innovation; and talent availability during the HIMSS Indonesian Digital Transformation Symposium held on 25 May 2022 in Jakarta.

Data-related obstacles

Dr Rachmat, who is chair of the HIMSS22 Organising Committee, said data storage was an issue. However, at the same time, data integration, interoperability, processing, acquisition and security must be considered.

"This is very important [in terms of] how we do data structuring [and] data labelling so that the data can later be used for analysis," she said.

"Then patient-generated clinical data, how we can integrate data from home care, data from clinics, and data from hospitals. It should be one strong data integration."

The result would then help improve patient care quality. "We approached HIMSS to collaborate with IHC to assess our maturity," she said, referring to the HIMSS Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model.

Since last year, she said IHC has started rolling out the implementation of a single medical record system (OSS), now incorporated at fourteen of its hospitals. This year, IHC is leaning towards working on defining the scope of data structure in data mining and a data lake.

By 2024, IHC aims to unlock medical data value, invention commercialisation, and medical patents that could be used from research findings to discover new treatments based on correctly sourced data.

Human resources

Dr Rachmat found it difficult to find doctors who could work with the IT department, as well as IT professionals to work with people in the medical field.

"Until now, around thirty programmers have joined me, but actually more programmers are needed,” she told the symposium, adding that about six thousand people have supported Mayo Clinic's IT infrastructure.

She said the consumer and human experience aspects were still being built and would constantly need development and collaboration.

Scalability

Another challenge in building the system or design, she said, was to choose the architectural method that would be used. In IHC's case, she added, the corporation used the architecture to establish one or two hospitals, but it would later be utilised to construct 76 hospitals nationwide.

"Scalability becomes important when we choose which architecture we should take," she told the symposium.

Future hopes

She hopes digital healthcare transformation in Indonesia can fulfil patients' need for comfort, patient-centredness, quality improvement and cost reduction.

Those reasons made her decide to partner HIMSS. "We become strong if we collaborate together in Indonesia’s digital healthcare transformation," she said.

"The Indonesian healthcare industry must enter the global market and collaborate with its players."