Healthcare IT Innovation Week
Through a rather weird round about I’m somehow involved in this now. But maybe it’s interesting, why don’t you also check them out?
Healthcare IT Innovation Week ~ http://www.healthcareit.com.sg
Integrating Healthcare Empowering Patients [FREE Admission]
2 February 2007 (Friday) 8:30am – 5:30pm @ Grand Hyatt Singapore, Grand Ballroom, Level 2 (dress nice nice!) The agenda.
I think it’ll be a great day for people in the healthcare and IT industry to mingle and understand what each other need better. Since it’s a MOH and IDA collaboration, I expect that there will be a strong government theme. I’ll also be diong quite a bit of “shopping” for products in the afternoon.
If your organization deals with healthcare, maybe you also want to consider attending a crash course on medical informatics (Health infomatics?!?)
Health Informatics http://www.gatewaypl.com
Co-organized by SGH Postgrad Medical Institute, SGH Infotech & Gateway [NOT FREE]
3 & 5 – 8 Feb 2007 @ Holiday Inn Parkview Hotel, and in endorsed under IDA’s inSkills@work programme, i.e. 50% funding possible.
I’ll update this post to turn it from an invitation into a lesson learned later.
Arrived late and left early, but attended most part of it. The content was pretty good actually, especially considering it’s the healthcare people talking.
As usual, typically we really pay attention to the ang moh only as the local presenters are mostly doing a report card presentation about the small little steps S’pore is making. No doubt they are important, but their results are as easily found on the web as well.
Richard Granger I thought was the best presenter of the day, being Director-General of IT for the National Health Service in UK, his transformation story of the UK medical industry in 4 years was really heart warming, especially to people like me, who really want to see various domain experts harness technology to achieve what they need without burning too big a hole in their pocket. IT systems are still expensive, especially these hospital ones, even though everybody has tried to commoditize it, no two hospitals in the world operate the same way. Heck, even S’pore’s clusters can’t force their own hospitals to comply, forget MOH.
The ang mohs’ stories all have the recurring theme of “standards”. We’ve yet to find the “rosettanet” for healthcare (eventhough HL7 has been coming very close to worldwide adoption after some parts of it being included in some ISO standards). Only 70 countries in the world have expressed interest to have some national database of patient records, which is one of the biggest barrier and overhead when it comes to patient care.
For the local dudes, we saw cluster fights, with someone asking people to go to SingHealth hospitals and people from NHG passing snide remarks about looking after bottom line etc. but overall, in a short and succint day, we can see the biggest barrier to anything happening in S’pore – the constant bickering of MOH, SingHealth and NHG about who is right and what should be done next. I mean, yes, cool, within a cluster there are projects and deeper pockets to see certain systems being rolled out albeit at a high cost sometimes (e.g. SAP), but adoption has been varied. And without the person seeing through their pet project from start till finish while retaining their power bases, the IT industry who is trying to help will have to sit back and watch.
I mean, look, if things are to happen the way it used to happen in S’pore, MOH needs a better grip on the compliance issues. It shouldn’t be NHG creating a drug dictionary for their cluster use, but a nationwide effort, if not global effort. S’pore this peanut so small also cannot agree, what is this talk about bringing the technology here to other countries? Fine, we have electronic exchange of patient records, but only between clusters – what about the tourist that will need health care here? Have we started sharing the drug stockpile between clusters? Don’t claim victory until every piece of paper has been eliminated from the hospitals, or better still, eliminate the hospitals and do only home care, or whatever, but there’s a long way to go and don’t let these I don’t friend you you don’t friend me thing get in the way.
Btw, anyone mind bringing me into SingHealth to see what their iTAG has done? Look quite interesting.