The health care industry is traditionally defined as a industry that provides medical services for treatment and prevention. The rapid advance of information and communication technology, however, have accelerated the innovation in health care and ext...
The health care industry is traditionally defined as a industry that provides medical services for treatment and prevention. The rapid advance of information and communication technology, however, have accelerated the innovation in health care and extended the definition of health care to personal care. Hence, the recent heath care industry consists of hospitals and private companies who produce health management products, for example, digital sensors, wearable devices, next generation sequencing and so on. These innovations in health care sector with new technology generate the various personal health care data which is a core of the next innovation.
The health care data could be classified into four areas: medical electronic record, national health information, personal health record, and genome information. To manage these types of health care data in terms of generation, integration, analysis, and application, would be challenging because current health system and policy is still based on evidence-based medicine rather than precision medicine. On the other hand, the health care data would contribute on personalized suitable medical services as well as reduced medical costs.
Some countries have already paid attention to the importance of data in health care innovation. In case of USA, the open innovation supported by government and private sector keeps continued to build the sound ecosystem of health care industry. Especially, US government has restructured the payment system on the basis of health care data. On the other hand, UK fails to implement the NPfIT because of top-down approach from government and closeness of system operations. These two cases show that our government also considers the open innovation and incentive program to attract private sector in health care innovation driven by data.
This study examined and discussed how to develop appropriate policies and strategies for emerging health care innovations driven by data. First, it needs to build the governance structure which aims at the openness and the responsibility. A new organization that manages and integrates the entire health care data should be installed for inclusive governance to participate in various stakeholder. Second, financial incentive system for generators of health care data is also considered. Generators of health care data, e.g. hospitals, rely heavily on the government payment system in finance. Hence, the government investments to extend the infrastructure of health care data results in positive effects on spillover of health care innovation. Finally, two-track approach to utilize health care data is recommended. Horizontal approach to treat serious patients and vertical approach to care life-time health could be connected and integrated through health care innovation driven by data.