© 2024 Institute for Biotechnology and Medicine Industry & Research Center for Biotechnology and Medicine Policy
2021-05-12
Source: TechOrange
BY MISHA LU - 2021-05-10 - IN TECHNOLOGY
Taiwan’s aging population has made smart healthcare increasingly vital. From 2025 on, one fifth of the Taiwanese population will be above age 65. By 2034, over half of the population will be above 50.
Last week, Taiwan’s Food and Drug Association (FDA) established an office dedicated to smart medical devices, aiming to better coordinate governmental regulations in smart healthcare equipment while promoting an AI-driven healthcare industry, a nascent sector.
When it comes to “Software as a Medical Device”, the Taiwanese government is still building its regulatory framework, however. While medical software, mainly responsible for the collection, storage and analysis of medical data, is not regulated, the software for medical devices require more supervision as they are directly concerned with disease prevention, diagnoses and treatments.
To date, the annual output value of Taiwan’s medical equipment, estimated to be USD 4 billion, only accounts for less than 1% of the global market. The Taiwanese government would like to change it. The path is a long and winding one.
As the medical application of AI has grown to be a major trend, Taiwan has been struggling to leverage its IT advantages to gain a foothold in the growing market for medical AI. The global AI in the healthcare market is expected to reach USD 45.2 billion by 2026, with the software segment expected to hold the largest share.
However, Taiwan’s venture into smart healthcare has been, ironically, constrained by its own advantage – a phenomenon not only unique to the smart healthcare industry, but the entire AI development strategy as well.
It has been argued that Taiwan’s AI development has come to be overly dependent on its traditional hardware makers, especially on the policy level. Indeed, leading Taiwanese hardware manufacturers like Quanta Computer, Wistron Corp. and Pegatron Corp. have played an outsized role in Taiwan’s AI development. Taiwan’s software industry, on the other hand, has remained weak, despite the key role of software in AI development.
In the healthcare sector, this hardware-driven tendency stands out even more, as hospitals prefer to purchase hardware-based solutions for smart healthcare, and are less willing to spend resources on hiring software engineers. Barry Lin, the founder of Quanta Computer and a prominent advocate of smart healthcare, observed that the development of medical AI should be led by medical professionals, and too much responsibility was placed on the ICT sector.
“The ICT industry is adept at digitalizing medical tools, but smart healthcare is the integration of medical expertise and tools,” Lin said. “A deep cooperation between ICT and medical industries is necessary to develop smart healthcare solutions.”
To promote a software-based smart healthcare strategy, the establishment of an office for smart medical devices represents a small step to the right direction. Taiwan’s smart healthcare development has so far focused on three parts: streamlining the healthcare process, medical equipment and the administration of care itself. The first part has been the fastest developing sector: it mostly involves the digitalization of procedures and poses a lower entry barrier for the ICT industry.
Access to medical data, however, raises the threshold to enter the other sectors. The crucial next step, therefore, is to create a data regulation environment suitable for AI training.
Owing to strict data privacy laws, it has been challenging for Taiwanese enterprises to gain access to the rich medical data accumulated by Taiwan’s national health insurance service. That in turn leaves start ups with few data available for algorithm-training, driving them to seek cooperation with hospitals – a slower process that inevitably impedes start-up growth.
Source in Chinese: Digitimes, BusinessNext, CommonWealth