Over the next 10 years, Thais are expected to have good health with the ability to predict any health problems disease and prevent themselves from any potential diseases.
Testing technology developed by Nectec to enable doctors in remote areas to work with the doctors in Bangkok via the Internet.
Thanks to the "Smart Health" project, initiated by the National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (Nectec), that targets the goal of "smart health information system for smart living and better care services" that will eventually lead the nation to become "Healthy Thailand".
Smart Health in one of Nectec's three flagship projects--digitized Thailand, Smart Farm and Smart Health.
Smart Health would apply IT usage to medical and health sectors with the ultimate goal of giving people a better quality of life of people, with smart living by the better care services, either corrective care services, proactive care services, or preventive care services, according to Nectec deputy director Dr Asanee Kawtrakul.
During an exclusive interview, she noted that Thai society has been moving toward a "senior citizen society", with smaller families, while the working-age people spend most of their time out of the home.
Medical human resource have become limited and Thailand has developed a healthcare service divide. It's thus important for people educate themselves on health matters and help prevent illnesses and disease.
Nectec has addressed the research and development model in two phases, an urgent period which focuses on the development of a national health information system (NHIM), and a planning phase for the near future which will take three to five years for setting a vision and a roadmap. These would be working together with relevant parties in terms of policy, service providers and users.
To achieve these goals needs a good database, Dr Asanee said.
She noted that at present, medical and health information had been stored on different platforms, and the NHIM would allow the sharing of information to serve for every level of medical and healthcare strategy, policy, decision making and administration. It would also help with preventive care services, and budget management.
The NHIM is not just the first significant step for Smart Health, but also the infrastructure for co-existing with future developments of intelligent information technology, such as an emergency call center, an expert system for risk management, a "smart home" for independent living and portable devices for self-administered tests.
"These will prepare for a future society that focuses on proactive care services to reduce health risks, for smart living and also to lessen the expense of healthcare services," she said.
At present, the Office of Policy and Strategy, Ministry of Public Health, is the main organisation responsible for national healthcare policy and strategy, and other agencies, including the National Health Security Office, the Social Security Office and the Budget Bureau, are involved with health insurance. They have to use national health and medical information for planning and administration. However, these organization's requirements change from year-to-year and have led to a variety of data recording methods.
Dr Asanee pointed out that these have led officials to spend more time on the job of data entry than providing healthcare services.
There were also problems of incorrect data being entered into the system, different demands for information, as well as data integration, because the service providers held information in a variety of ways.
During the first phase, from October 2008 to September 2009, Nectec will focus on the development of data standardization and data mining, so that the agencies involved would be able to access it.
Those would cover the minimum standard metadata set, metadata broker, meta data mapping tools and metadata conversion tool, data quality control process, health information security system, as well as information infrastructure design and improvement.
"The Data Schema Standard will help to integrate the scattering data which are in different platforms from many sources to be in the stage of health data interoperability. Meanwhile Nectec has developed the process and mechanism to serve for any changes of requirements in the future," she noted. It would take another few years to expand the result and integrate the information to be the national IT system that served for every target user.
The Smart Health's roadmap for the second phase, which will be from 2009 to 2013, will include the development of smart health devices, the expert system for risk management, and the collective intelligence based knowledge management and services.
The project leader stated that all of the technology for the Smart Health roadmap would be based on the Nectec R&D projects.
"We don't start with a new development project. The R&D projects have been borne from real requirements and we have brought them from 15 Nectec research labs which have related technology and integrated them," she noted.
Dr Asanee pointed out that smart health devices would be concerned with the integration of different technologies such as signal processing, bio sensors and special disease knowledge. Those devices include wearable health devices such as personalized ECG monitors, portable health devices such as cholesterol and triglyceride level measurement devices would possible with the use of nano-sensor technology. The software for planning and decision-making includes DentiPlan, Orthodontic treatment CephSmile and AlighBracket3D for dental work.
The expert system for risk management include temperature screening and diabetes screening systems based on the knowledge engineering and language engineering to extract the knowledge from documents (such as Clinical Practice Guidelines).
She raised an example of an application service that would lessen the health care divide, such as a heart signal analysis tool that can detect the heart activity of a patient and make a diagnosis by using the knowledge-base of the doctor.
The collective intelligence-based knowledge management and services are to support patient self-management education services and provide preventive care services. It aims to share knowledge and have the service's users access the new information.
These include the knowledge-based development of drug and healthcare services via the web site "Ya & You", the SizeThailand e-Health project's online consulting service, and the knowledge management system for diabetes by Ontology Engineering.
Applications such as the cholesterol or triglyceride sensors, microalbuminuria sensor, risk screening, data cleaning tools, emergency call center and early cancer detection were requirements that the project team has worked on in the field and coordinated with the organizations involved.
Dr Asanee remarked that all of those technologies and the new development technology could be integrated together to form a tele-healthcare service, an intelligent system for an emergency call center, and a smart home for smart living that would lessen the health care services divide.
The challenge was to allow a majority of people across the nation to be able to access these technologies.
The 10-year timeframe for the project would lead to nationwide improvements in health, faster care services for a better quality of life in the future with the concept "Smart Health, Smart Living".
"When health improves, everything gets better," Dr Asanee said.
Play video
» Ultimate virtualization blade
There are currently no comments for this post.