We lag world in using health data for good: Microsoft exec

Microsoft chief medical officer Simon Kos says Australia is at a tipping point.

Miikka Korja and Simon Kos in Sydney. Picture: Hollie Adams

Microsoft chief medical officer Simon Kos says Australia is at a tipping point in its use of healthcare technology and it needs to “leapfrog” to catch up to other countries in using data to improve health outcomes.

Dr Kos said Australia had spent a lot of time on health digitising but it had not given a lot of thought to what to do once a significant data asset had been built, and how that data could then be used to transform care.

“Countries that have been digital for many years are well down that journey already,” he said. “In Australia, we are at that tipping point — we need to use that data to drive improvements in care.

“It feels like the quality bar has been lifted by some of the international examples. The onus is now on us in Australia to play catch up.”

Dr Kos said Australia had the right systems in place and also had examples from other countries that had successfully used data, to leapfrog.

“That is the opportunity that is in front of us,” he said.

Australia’s push into one field of medical data that other countries have successfully adopted — electronic health records — has not been smooth. More than two million people opted out of their My Health Record, mostly because of privacy concerns.

Dr Kos said My Health Record clearly had adoption challenges.

“I think we came in with a technical solution first without thinking through the policy and adoption angles,” he said.

But he added that it was important because in Australia the different healthcare settings, including primary care, acute care, private care and aged care, did not effectively communicate.

“The patient is traversing those silos on their health journey and that is when mistakes happen,” Dr Kos said, adding that it was “really important we get some sort of comprehensive longitudinal view for healthcare providers, so they can see what is going on and so we can empower patients to understand what they have got and get them actively involved in their care”.

Helsinki University Hospital neurosurgeon and chief innovation officer Miikka Korja said Finland had been using electronic health records since the 1960s, but added that while that data had been collected for a long time, it had not previously been properly utilised.

“We have done academic studies but we didn’t really use the data in practice,” he said. “We finally (through technology) have a possibility to utilise the data in a clever way and turn it into improved clinical practices for the patient.”

Dr Korja, who was in Sydney to attend the Microsoft Future Now event, also outlined the benefit of being in a country that wasn’t ­focused on the rising cost of healthcare. He said the system in Finland wasn’t run on a cost benefit basis, as its healthcare was provided to its population via taxation and it did not need a strong private system.

“In every other country apart from the Nordics, health is also business,” he said.

“When health becomes business there are a lot of incentives that do not go hand-in-hand with the value, which is providing more and better health care.

“If you improve health, it’s very likely that in many systems you also cut down some costs but the primary aim is improving health not cost effectiveness.”

Dr Kos said one of biggest challenges in Australia’s heath system was that the model was geared around last century’s healthcare problems.

“We built hospitals because that was a good place to treat battlefield trauma and infectious disease but the problems we are dealing with today are lifestyle-­induced chronic disease and the hospital is not the best place to do it,” he said.

“The challenge is how to modernise at scale a system that is heavily invested in that.”