Taiwan ranked second, behind Singapore, in a new health index that measures progress toward personalized healthcare in Asia-Pacific countries, released on Thursday.
The Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Asia-Pacific Personalized Health Index praised Taiwan for its “strong digital infrastructure, comprehensive health data collection, increasing data interoperability and signs of a robust personalized health workforce.”
The report said that Taiwan could further bolster its position by “increasing investment in healthcare research and development and improving the accessibility of data for research.”
“Clearer and more connected strategies concerning the use of personalized health-enabling technologies, such as artificial intelligence, as well as improving equity in healthcare access and quality could also be a focus for Taiwan moving forward,” it said.
The index measures the readiness of 11 health systems across the region — Taiwan, Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and Thailand — to adopt personalized healthcare.
The index was released as part of the FutureProofing Healthcare initiative, led by a panel of 15 healthcare experts across the region, during an online presentation, titled “Building long-term sustainable and personalized healthcare systems,” held in Singapore.
The panel included Gau Churn-shiouh (高純琇), a professor in National Taiwan University’s School of Pharmacy and former executive director of the Center for Drug Evaluation.
Gau said that Taiwan’s performance was largely due to the solid foundation the country built over the past decades with its national healthcare database and cancer registry, among others.
Taiwan has one of the world’s best digital infrastructures, allowing precision medicine to flourish in the country, she added.
However, there is still room for improvement in speeding up new medicine applications, Gau said.
The index measures performance against 27 different indicators of personalized health across four categories: policy context, health information, personalized technologies and health services.
In health information, which looks at data, infrastructure and technical expertise driving personalized healthcare, Taiwan ranked third, with a score of 76, while in health services, it ranked fifth, with a score of 64.
Under the personalized technologies indicator, which looks at devices, applications, platforms and reimbursement structures for personalized healthcare, Taiwan ranked third, with a score of 62, while it also ranked third, with a score of 66, in the policy context category.
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