Feature

If there was ever a good year to be sick, it would be 2015, as public and private entities are injecting renewed vigour into the Asia-Pacific region’s healthcare scene. Experts are predicting that the industry will continue on an upwards trajectory, spearheaded by innovations in primary care and hospital services.

They can breeze through the economic slowdown.

Find out what HIMSSAsiaPac15 has in store.

IBM’s Dr Watson will revitalise the hospital’s oncology department.

Healthcare solutions from Australia and Singapore aim to ease the burden of managing staff to provide better services to patients.

While Asia’s health industry must address a host of vital issues, analysts agree hospital coffers need the most attention.

Gone are the days when only a few individuals, mostly the well-to-do, could afford decent medical insurance coverage.

With the rise of chronic diseases and an increasing elderly population in Singapore, the island’s residents are shifting their medical spending strategy towards early disease detection instead of reactive treatment. This bodes well for advanced diagnostic imaging services, which have seen increased demand. These allow Singaporeans to detect a disease before it progresses into the later, deadlier, stages with higher costs.

The government of the world’s third-biggest democracy takes on the formidable task of providing healthcare for every Indonesian. How do you solve a problem like covering healthcare for more than 250 million people? For a country as huge as Indonesia, the solution lies in an ambitious program that aims to introduce universal health care coverage by 2019. Fresh from electing President Joko Widodo in the recent national elections, Indonesia is now focusing on making healthcare a priority on the government’s development agenda. This task, however, comes with a number of challenges and opportunities that require a look at the archipelago’s changing market and political landscape.

You trust you’re in good hands when you are in a hospital for treatment. But what happens when hospitals turn out to be dangerous places due to medical errors, resulting in what people in the medical community call “adverse events” (AEs)?

Is medical tourism now one of Singapore's weak spots?

Chai Chuah is the Acting Director-General for Health and Chief Executive of the Ministry of Health in New Zealand. In this interview, he shares with Healthcare Asia lessons learned from the government’s response to the Christchurch earthquake, a new philosophy in approaching the healthcare targets in New Zealand, the biggest challenges facing his leadership and the innovative ways that the Ministry of Health is making healthcare better for New Zealanders.

Singapore’s chronic health patients may highly value their privacy, but many can live with the idea of strangers seeing their medical records if it means they can view their charts over the Internet.

When Apollo Hospitals Group devised its strategy to deliver worldclass patient care, it knew for certain that securing the right accreditation was only the first step.

Most people think the opportunities in healthcare are around ever growing private hospital groups. But one Singaporean company is showing there is more than one way to take a bite out of the healthcare apple. Q&M runs 60 dental practices across Singapore, with more clinics in Malaysia and China — making it one of the fastest growing dental chains in Asia.

When patients step into one of the more cutting-edge clinics or hospitals in Singapore or Malaysia, many may notice a marked improvement in care delivery — procedures are completed more quickly and smoothly, and operating staff give more attention to the patient, rather than focusing on paperwork.