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Unleashing and transforming the power of digital health

The Covid-19 experience offers many lessons and new use cases, and collaboration will be crucial to accelerate the digital transformation of healthcare. To create systems of care, there is an essential need for openness.

Joann O'Brien
17 Sep 2020
Unleashing and transforming the power of digital health

Unleashing and transforming the power of digital health

In this blog, Joann O’Brien, TM Forum’s VP of Digital Ecosystems, writes about her recent research on the role of digital transformation in a post Covid-19 era. O’Brien is co-author of a new TM Forum report on the role for ICT players in transforming digital health, and she is Digital Health Lead for The Global Industry Organizations Roundtable (GIO).

GIO and TM Forum are focusing on the needs of the health sector, specifically in standards development, open systems, interoperability, and privacy and security by design. Our goal is to design cross-industry collaborative work that will not only make a difference to the healthcare industry and the lives of millions of people around the planet, but also to our members’ ability to diversify and provide needed services to existing and new customers.

What can we learn from Covid-19?


Prior to Covid-19, healthcare systems were already stressed. Rising healthcare costs, growing and aging populations, and stagnating GDPs are three macro forces that have been on a collision path for years. Now, the pandemic is triggering an unprecedented demand for digital health technology, leading to innovative solutions, such as population screening, infection tracking and prioritization of resource allocation.

Covid-19 makes a significant case to rethink aspects of healthcare systems, while retaining the functionally excellent work of care providers. We need to think about the holistic system of care and the role of digital to enable this, and we must invest in and consider what happens between each function of care and how they interconnect.

The need for openness and standards


The Covid-19 experience offers many lessons and new use cases, and collaboration will be crucial to accelerate the digital transformation of healthcare. To create systems of care, there is an essential need for openness.

As we are witnessing with Covid-19, healthcare data needs to be interconnected regionally and globally. While research institutions seem relatively well connected, infection and impact data are calculated and shared by countries in different ways. This impacts and reduces the pool of trusted and anonymized data that organizations and research institutes can use to understand patterns quickly – for example, using AI and machine learning.

In creating open systems, standards must be defined and then adopted. Healthcare has made a tremendous leap forward in recent years with the Health Level 7 International (HL7) standards organization and its Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) specification. Meanwhile, TM Forum has been leading an effort to transform the telecommunications sector from being isolated systems to interconnected systems globally.
It is not enough to create a community of standards developers and followers, however. We also must work with the community of service providers to drive demand for such standards. This means developing Open APIs as part of the policy and process framework, as well as providing extensive education.

Re-architecting healthcare systems


Traditional barriers across industries are blurring, dissolving to help advances in one sector achieve the ambitions of another. For example, the drive toward open, interconnected systems can provide significant support to communities that lack care.

A recent TM Forum proof of concept explored how to re-architect healthcare systems using telecommunications to bring care to 1 billion people in rural India. The project, Enabling affordable and quality digital health ecosystem for more than 1 billion lives, showed how ubiquitous access to connectivity can help solve the lack of access to healthcare – a digital answer to a real-world health system problem.

The project brought together healthcare professionals, communications service providers and health suppliers to fill this gap with high-quality, affordable healthcare. While the project used mobile technology, the fundamental value came from re-architecting the system of care, such that access to care could be from anywhere.

Watch this video to learn more about the project:


Collaboration is key


The realization and acceleration of digital health will require a multi-sector ecosystem, where the private sector, civil societies, NGOs, academia and governments play an equally important role. To achieve the best result, we need to work together, creating communities of collaboration, building upon the strong foundations of standards and open systems, stimulating innovation, and driving for patient-first, secure systems of care.

If you’re interested in learning more about the important collaborative work that GIO and TM Forum members are conducting in the healthcare sector, please contact me directly and download our new report, Leveraging ICT to transform global healthcare, below:

Download the report