APEC Conference on Medical Information Sharing for Enhancing Medical and Disease Management

INTRODUCTION

Many economies are now facing the growing prevalence of non-communicable diseases in rapid population ageing. With the growth in number of patients with multiple chronic conditions, the healthcare systems encounter the challenges of rising medical costs and duplication of resources due to lake of integration in health care services across various sectors. Therefore, building the infrastructure for sharing medical or health information across different health care providers is crucial.

In Chinese Taipei, the National Health Insurance (NHI) is a compulsory program, implemented in 1995, which covers all residents. As the NHI is a single-payer system, accumulated over the course of 24 years of claim data, the NHI Administration (NHIA) introduced a centralized medication information sharing platform for every NHI contracted medical institutions in 2013. This medication information sharing system entitled “PharmaCloud” contains the diagnosis and prescription codes of each physician visit with 3 months of every NHI insured. The “PharmaCloud” was then expanded to include examination result and imaging files and has been renamed as “NHI MediCloud” since 2016. This medical information sharing system (NHI MediCloud) not only enhances the communication between health care providers but also improves care coordination for patients. Furthermore, it also effectively reduces the overlap in days of drug use, the times of repeated examinations and enhances patients’ safety.

Through the APEC project, NHIA provided APEC economies with a platform to realize, share, and discuss their experience in developing medical information sharing mechanism to enhance medical and disease management. This project is designed not only to support the “Healthy Asia-Pacific 2020” initiative but to follow APEC Chile 2019 priorities, “Digital society” in order to assist in building capacity of developing sustainable and affordable health systems by using internet and cloud technologies, especially for those who are under the way of implementing electrical medicalrecords and data exchange mechanisms, which will ensure health for all.

OBJECTIVES AND DELIVERABLES

1. To introduce the latest development in health information sharing or exchange mechanism in public and private sectors in Chinese Taipei;
2. To share experiences and discuss applications of health information and images as well as further development with APEC economies and stakeholders;
3. To provide participants good practices (successful cases) or achievements of medical information sharing systems for enhancing their knowledge and capacity when developing their own ones;
4. To establish a communication platform that facilitates and shares applications of health information in order to enhance the population’s health within the region and long-term cooperative partnerships.

CONFERENCE OBJECTIVES

This project was carried out in the form of a 2-day international conference. The proposed conference was held in Taipei on August 8-9, 2019 and consisted of interactive speech sessions, poster viewing, exhibition booths and site visit to one smart hospital, which not only uses medical information sharing system and develops innovative applications in providing enhanced healthcare services for patients.

The conference is a 2-day event with a hospital visit. The topics for interactive session include:

1. The global trends and achievements of applying medical Information exchange in healthcare improvement.
2. The strategies and views on medical information collecting, sharing, using and data Security.
3. Applications of ICT in strengthening healthcare in hospitals/ public sectors.

CONFERENCE INFORMATION

1. TITLE: APEC Conference on Medical Information Sharing for Enhancing Medical and Disease Management
2. EVENT DATE: 8th-9th August, 2019
3. VENUE: Howard Civil Service International House
4. HOST: National Health Insurance Administration, Ministry of Health and Welfare
5. AGENDA
6. PROJECT FINAL REPORT

PROJECT ACHIEVEMENTS

In this Conference, there were over 300 participants, including 38 foreign guests of nominate participants, official delegates, expert speakers and panelists from 13 APEC member economies. From the survey, over 90% of the participants were satisfied with agenda topics and agreed the materials distributed were useful. Many positive feedbacks regarding to project’s results and knowledge learning were also provided from these participants. In addition to presentation and discussion during the conference, lively interaction and discussion also took place at poster presentations and exhibition booths areas where demonstrated the latest application of Integrated Health Information Platform, Mobile Healthcare Services, Virtual Care, Block Chain and AI, etc. Thus, the project’s objectives were successfully achieved:

1. Sharing the global perspectives and experiences of how to collect, store, use and protect medical(health) data for assisting the economies in capacity building of medical information management.
2. Introducing the different framework of health information system currently applied in providing better healthcare services across the economies.
3. Demonstrating the advanced applications of medical(health)  information which are widely implemented in public or private sector.

Greatly encouraged by the outcomes and achievements of the project, NHIA aims to achieve a long-lasting cooperation relationship to strengthen healthcare systems and increase its efficiency, quality and sustainability among APEC economies through sharing models of medical (health) information applications.