Ahead of the release of the HIMSS APAC CIO report in November, an expert panel at the HIMSS21 APAC Conference discussed problems confronting health CIOs today and shared solutions to resolve them.

The panel comprised Kuroda Tomohiro, CIO and Medical Information Technology and Administration Planning Division Director at Kyoto University Hospital in Japan; Alistair Vickers, CIO at Tu Ora Primary Health Organisation in New Zealand; and HIMSS UK Chief Clinical Officer Dr Charles Alessi. 

In the upcoming report, five key trends among health organisations in Asia-Pacific were identified: strengthening cybersecurity; adoption of care delivery models that enable self-management of health and wellness; analytics at the core of organisations' work and processes; reliance on automation; and high digital literacy among the workforce. 

Among these trends, health leaders from New Zealand and Japan both said they are prioritising the digital literacy of their workforce. 

Kuroda emphasised its relevance in Japan given that most health systems there are "conservative" and that health workers are "too busy" to take in new information. What they did, he said, is to simplify instructions on handling new systems. 

Tu Ora moved staff to the cloud and trained them with communication platforms when COVID-19 started spreading globally. "It was just beautifully timed that we were able to help them through that modality of working remotely," Vickers shared. 

Meanwhile, he also pointed out that those key trends "interlink" with one another. "If you don't train [staff] properly to use [digital] tools, the chances of cyber incidents increase. If you want to get technology out to patients and help them manage their own health more actively, this [also] concerns data literacy," he explained.

Analytics is also one area where Kyoto University Hospital is focused. Kuroda said they have been trying to implement IoT devices into the hospital's system. Although they are burdened with the cost of deploying such technology, it nonetheless helped with decreasing workload, especially in diagnostics. 

On the other hand, Tu Ora is working to collaborate with other stakeholders in New Zealand's health ecosystem to come together and share data to generate major insights that will address major inequities in the country's healthcare system.

In terms of technology, the primary care provider has moved to a centralised data warehouse paradigm hosted on Microsoft Azure while the Japanese university hospital has put in place separate analytics tools for its clinical side and research and epidemiology. 

On automation, Vickers shared that they have automated the processes around claims and payments, which has helped ensure quicker and more accurate payments. They are prioritising those areas where automation and analytics can add real value in care delivery.

At the close of the panel discussion, Dr Alessi concluded that across care settings, "the trends are inevitably going to be the same as we move into this multimodal new digital age".

The HIMSS21 APAC Conference took place on 18 and 19 October. All sessions can be accessed on-demand by registering here. If you have already registered, log in here.