In recent years, digital healthcare has flourished. From innovations in cloud computing and medical AI, to telemedicine and precision health in the post-pandemic era, to the Ministry of Health and Welfare's policies on opening hospitals to the cloud and promoting telemedicine, to the Ministry of Economic Affairs' amendments to the "Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industry Development Act" to include digital healthcare, major hospitals, tech giants, and startups have all invested resources to achieve success. At the same time, we've seen international IT giants and medical device companies seeking opportunities in Taiwan, leading to high expectations for digital healthcare among the Taiwanese people, who even view it as a future pillar of the nation.
However, behind these bustling scenes lies a significant concern: Taiwan lacks a robust healthcare information industry to support digital healthcare. Taiwan's healthcare information industry has developed for over 30 years, accumulating a large pool of healthcare information professionals and thus improving efficiency in healthcare and health insurance management. However, due to the characteristics of Taiwan's healthcare industry, large hospitals often develop their own healthcare information systems, while existing healthcare information vendors primarily serve smaller regional hospitals and clinics, resulting in a relatively small healthcare information industry.
Furthermore, since Taiwanese medical institutions are non-profit organizations, the percentage of software professionals dedicated to healthcare information technology over the past decade has been extremely low. This has caused the current healthcare information systems in Taiwanese hospitals to gradually fall behind the cloud-based software architectures that are already widely used in other industries. Healthcare information professionals spend most of their time dealing with short-term applications and cybersecurity challenges, making it difficult to deliver the digital healthcare that the Taiwanese people expect.
It is gratifying that the Ministry of Health and Welfare began planning a next-generation healthcare information system last year, with a planned large budget to address the outdated architecture of Taiwan's current healthcare information systems. However, this only solves half the problem. More importantly, this opportunity should be used to restructure Taiwan's healthcare information industry, gradually shifting large hospitals from painstakingly recruiting talent to build and maintain their own healthcare information systems to purchasing high-quality products. Actively fostering large, internationally-capable flagship healthcare information companies, emulating Epic and Cerner, to provide large hospitals with reliable and highly scalable healthcare information solutions, possessing integrated comprehensive patient data, capable of interfacing with international data standards, exporting to overseas markets, and establishing application ecosystems, thereby attracting top-tier digital software talent to continue investing in the field.
Once Taiwan's medical information infrastructure is connected to the international market, Taiwan's abundant startups in software, medical devices, and medical AI will have the opportunity to showcase their talents on the world stage, no longer limited to a single small market.
Source: Financial News Issue 679