Digital Health Technologies Impacting Asia

 6-Sep-14, by Pete Read, Director, Global Growth Markets 

This article was first published in The Digital Health Post.

While the US remains the undoubted center of the digital health world, momentum is now beginning to build in Asia. A sprawling region, home to over 2.5 billion people, it is characterized by its diversity of cultures and prosperity levels. Demographic factors unite many Asian countries, with their large, aging populations – a perfect combination for digital health technologies. Both governments and the private sector are investing in projects around the region.

In China, Alibaba recently announced that its affiliate Alipay has started signing up hospitals so its users can register, pay for services and even check clinical test results using their mobile devices. Although it has so far signed up less than 100 of China’s 25,000 hospitals, with its 300 million-plus users there is a good chance Alipay could leapfrog to the forefront of the digital health game in China. 

Alipay smartphone software (image courtesy Alibaba)

Other significant digital health initiatives have been rolled out in China this year. Dnurse launched a mobile phone-connected glucometer in April, and in the central China city of Wuhan, a mobile video doctor consultation service is now being tested.

Singapore is one of the most advanced locations for both technology and healthcare. The Ministry of Health plans to pilot a platform in 2015 that can pull anonymized patient data from multiple sources including healthcare providers and patients’ own monitoring devices, planning to use it for analysis and insights that will lead to better care.

In July, Malaysian telco Maxis and the digital health company Embedded Wireless Labs (EWL) launched a new M2M monitoring solution designed to capture and store patients’ health indicators and vital signs, and make the data available remotely to clinicians and care-givers via a portal. 

Aside from China, Asia’s other billion-plus population giant is India, where most people still live in rural areas. Cloud-enabled eHealth centres, which can be housed in a shipping container and placed wherever needed, have proved a highly effective means to bring healthcare to the masses. The number of these connected mini-clincs is to be expanded, in a partnership between Narayana Health Group and HP aimed at improving health screening and primary care, and making progress towards early detection, diagnosis and preventive healthcare on a large scale.

HP/Narayana eHealth centre (image courtesy HP)

India is also one of the few markets where Blackberry is still growing, and in July the company announced a new connected health service platform that will connect thousands of medical devices, in partnership with NantHealth. The service will integrate clinical, financial and operational data with the objective of improving both diagnostics and service delivery.

 Insights