Establishing the Hub for “Learning Health System” for South Asia

The gradual aging of the Taiwanese population has strained the government’s ability to provide healthcare for such a large number of elderly citizens. This has caused various healthcare policies to be enacted urgently to begin meeting the challenge. In addition, people have also become more aware of the ways that advances in medical technology can improve their lives and now have higher expectations for how their own personal healthcare data should be leveraged to meet these expectations. Personalized healthcare, information technology, cloud computing have opened up all kinds of new healthcare applications and possibilities. These new technologies will affect government, industry, and academia and bring in new business opportunities. Information and communication technology and ehealth can lower costs and unite once disparate industries. Electronic health records can also empower patients, increase healthcare literacy, increase safety, and encourage patient compliance. Patients can also participate in their own health diagnoses and make informed decisions. Establishing an ehealth hub where various parties can share data is the main topic of this research proposal. This ehealth hub follows the Institute of Medicine’s 2007 promotion of Learning Health Systems We have asked Charles P Friedman, a professor with extensive experience in designing Learning Health Systems, to be a mentor on this project. This ehealth hub will be an international collaboration that will provide opportunities to share ideas, hold workshops, meetings, and incorporate the perspectives of other domain experts. This research will also provide opportunities to do systematic reviews and meta-analyses on best practices for how to use EHR data. The ehub will also provide the ability to have quality indicators. It is expected that not only will this learning health system provide benefits to society and generate data-driven health policies, it will also strengthen individual patients’ ability to take charge of their health.