Asia-Pacific’s healthcare industry, about 77% of business leaders believe it is urgent to embrace the fourth industrial revolution, reveals the Microsoft Asia Digital Transformation Survey published in early November.
Most of them think that they need to transform their company into a digital business to enable future growth, but fewer have already developed a strong strategy.
Only 1 in 4 leaders say they have a complete digital strategy
The study covered 1,494 business leaders from the Asia-Pacific region working in organizations with more than 250 employees. It has been conducted in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand.
Although most respondents of the survey agree on the importance of a digital transformation, only 25% said that they have a full digital strategy in place today.
45% of them said they are implementing specific digital transformation initiatives for selected parts of their organization, and 30% said they still have very limited or no strategy in place.
A lack of responsiveness
« The [survey] has shown that Asia Pacific’s healthcare providers are not acting fast enough in capitalizing the value of latent data to transform a reactive ‘sick care system’ into a proactive one that manages individual and population health more effectively and at a lower cost, » said Gabe Rijpma, senior director of Health and Social Services in Asia at Microsoft.
The 4 key pillars of digital transformation according to Microsoft
According to Microsoft’s observations, a digital transformation in a healthcare organization is divided into four key pillars:
- 1. Healthcare providers can enable new ways of connecting with patients before, during and after their interaction with caregivers.
- 2. The care team has to be empowered.
This allows care workers and clinicians to be connected securely to information and people they need, wherever they are. Quality and outcomes of health services can also be improved by enabling clinicians and consumers to access and analyze information so that they can make more informed choices.
- 3. There is a need to optimize clinical and operational effectiveness.
Healthcare providers need to improve the responsiveness of their business and service levels but also reduce costs through intelligent processes by coordinating people and assets more effectively, respond to issues in real time and solve them preemptively.
- 4. Finally, it is necessary to transform the continuum of care.
The opportunity to embed software and technology directly into products and services is evolving how organizations deliver value, enabling new business models, and disrupting established markets. Healthcare providers can improve the quality of care and reduce per capita costs by providing new models of care.
Digital transformation: the lack of policy support is one of the obstacles
According to healthcare leaders who participated in the study, the main barriers to digital transformation faced by healthcare industry in Asia-Pacific are, in order of priority:
- lack of supporting government policies and ICT infrastructure;
- the existence of an uncertain economic environment;
- cyber threats and security concerns;
- lack of organizational leadership, skills to imagine, plan and direct execution;
- the fact that there is no urgency or need to counter the disruptors of the industry.