Barry Lam and Young-way Liu, chairmen representing ICT giants Foxconn and Quanta, projected their views on ICT in healthcare

2020-01-10

 

Barry Lam and Young-way Liu, chairmen representing ICT giants Foxconn and Quanta, projected their views on ICT in healthcare and suggested that the ICT industry would need a decade to see its development to bear fruit.

Global expense on digital healthcare is estimated to hit $10 trillion, of digital healthcare valued at $504bn by 2025. mHealth, said Young-way Liu, takes up more than a half of the pie (54%) and that is the opportunity for the ICT sector to chip in. Foxconn cannot afford to be missed from healthcare, Mr Liu continued, the company has a cancer centre up and running through a joint venture with National Taiwan University, mobile healthcare solutions on-the-go in development with strategic partners, and ZAP- the world’s first non-invasive surgery robot specialised in head and neck cancer which has gained FDA clearance and has been rolled out to 50 hospitals in the US. 

 

Quanta chairman Barry Lam though that challenges facing the ICT are overwhelming. Physicians and patients have yet to build their confidence in AI in medical care, he noted. Barry Lam flagged as well that data it refers to precision medicine is not limited to data sets collected at hospitals but through multiple sources including health insurance companies. The large amount of digital health records is not necessarily duplicated yet complementary. Big data has been escalating in development and it is anticipated to generate $252bn in 2020. 

 

The US introduced Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) for hospitals to comply with upon exchanging electronic health records. Barry Lam expressed his hope that FHIR can be implemented in Taiwan in the near future.