A recent government-sponsored conference in Hanoi brought together health authorities and experts from Vietnam and Australia to look at areas of cooperation in developing the digital infrastructure and capacity of the local health landscape.
The event was attended by representatives of the Vietnam Military-Civil Medicine Association, the Health Strategy and Policy Institute of the Vietnam Ministry of Health and the Iverson Health Innovation Research Institute of Swinburne University of Technology, Australia.
WHY IT MATTERS
In a report By the The state-run Vietnam News Agency, Deputy Health Minister Dr. Tran Van Thuan was quoted as saying saying that the local healthcare sector should prioritize obtaining resources to promote digital transformation to further facilitate patients’ access to medical services.
One way to achieve this is through cooperation and assistance from international partners, Dr Thuan said.
Currently, Vietnam’s healthcare sector faces obstacles in digital transformation, especially poor IT infrastructure to support EMR and scarce funding sources to adopt new health technologies in healthcare institutions.
Dr. Tran Quy Tuong, chairman of the Vietnam Health Informatics Association, also pointed to the lack of IT skills and manpower and the lack of standards and guidelines for connecting data between medical information systems as barriers to the digitalization of healthcare in the country.
Swinburne’s Iverson Health Innovation Research Institute, which was present at the conference, connects and collaborates with governments and industry to advance patient health record management, among other areas of digital health. No announcement has yet been made as to whether or not the research organization has formalized a partnership with the Vietnamese government.
THE GREATER CONTEXT
Vietnam aims to introduce smart healthcare by 2025 as part of the National Digital Transformation Program. This includes three areas of focus: smart disease prevention, smart medical research and treatment, and smart healthcare administration.
It was in 2019 that Vietnam started strengthening the foundation of its healthcare digitalization with the national rollout of EPDs. All public hospitals in the country have already implemented HIS, although work is still needed to get them to adopt PACS, RIS and LIS.
International partnerships have also played an important role in introducing emerging technologies into Vietnamese healthcare. Earlier this year, IT giant Microsoft signed its first technology partnership in the country; it is now partnering with VinBrain, a local AI healthcare company backed by Vietnam’s largest conglomerate Vingroup, to work on three areas of AI healthcare: data sharing, cross-product validation and R&D.