Introducing Technology to Build Harmonized Platform.

Keren Priyadharsini, PhD
Business Lead for Healthcare, Microsoft Asia

 

 

I think I have five stories to share with you all. Microsoft doesn't really have anything to do with healthcare. In fact, when I joined Microsoft a year ago, they asked 'Are you sure you want to join Microsoft? We have nothing to do with health care!' But again, I think Microsoft has done some amazing work in the field.

 

I think I will share with you five stories. Microsoft doesn't all about healthcare. When I joined Microsoft in a year and a half ago, they actually asked 'Are you sure you going to join Microsoft?' What is Microsoft to do with healthcare? But I think they've done an amazing work, especially in terms of research and organizational development. Microsoft came to areas that people tend to avoid, and provided solution for problems that happened in that area; and I want to share several stories related to this today; and these stories are also related to public-private partnership.

 

The first thing that I want to address is labor cost. How can we improve efficiency? Let's say that one doctor is able to handle up to 5000 patients. What if that doctor is able to handle 10.000 patients effectively? You'll reduce the cost, right? In Asia, people want to live longer; they are after a good quality of life; and chronic diseases are increasingly common in this region. If that's the case, then preventing someone from getting sick is the key to the effective health care services. Our health care system should focus in communicating with patients after they are discharged from the hospital about what they should do to avoid getting admitted to the hospital for another time; like in Singapore. There's a rapid increase in the percentage of chronic diseases within ageing population; thus we need to prevent them from getting into the hospital. It's a way to lower the burden caused by the disease. Thus the two most important things are: prevention and wellness.

 

For example, HCI in Apollo Hospital, 40 millions of people came to the hospital just to find out that they are actually not suffering from any disease at all. This is the kind of initiative that we need to promote. Second, it's important to ensure that hospitals have the proper facilities to host all patients. I have a friend who just had a surgery, and she had to stay in the hospital for five days; but two days later I saw her at her house and I asked what happened. She said that 'oh, they needed the bed'. Microsoft has a technology center in Singapore, and I believe that technology can make things easier for doctors, and lower the labor cost. When we talk about universal health care coverage, we never make use of epidemiology as preventive and predictive tools to lower the burden of the cost; and that's our aim now.

 

I want to share another stories with you. This is about cardiovascular diseases. Microsoft first launched it as a public consortium. In health care sector, we can no longer do everything on our own; we need to collaborate. We formulated an agreement and we decided to share our research lab, identify a common problem, and solve it in a collaborative partnership. We became a consortium. For example, in cardiovascular disease, Microsoft, Apollo hospital, and government worked together in order to formulate cardiovascular risk score. A lot people don't realize that they have heart problem. Back then, only people at their sixties or seventies got heart attack; but now it happens on people at their fourties. How can we predict that? How to find out that there is a problem that needs to be addresses? What to do with all of these health screening data? So this is what Microsoft did: we follow the health screening program and built a model which can generate a risk score, a probability that an individual might suffer from a heart attack in the next 10 years. We're not saying that the model is 100% accurate; it's just an indication that we need to do something in order to prevent it. The health screening program is carried out in every villages and cities, so you don't have to do anything much, all you have to do is to access the database and get your score, and tell the doctors to inform the score to their patients. This is a low cost option and it's so popular that the Indian government uses it on the whole population. Other governments are now considering it too. The model is not something that we build on American standard; it was built through the country's standard; it's customized.

 

Second, there's a little teashop in one of the villages. Screening equipment can be transported to these places by bicycle.

Another example, diabetes is a silent killer, and there's a diabetes epidemic happening right now. Singapore is under alert. Using AI, we're able to diagnose and slow down the progression of the disease. Another thing that is very common right now is myopia in children. I have two kids; one of them is 11 year-old and the other is 9. My 9 year-old daughter suffers from severe myopia. Cases of myopia in children are increasing. In China and Singapore they are working to see how we can use the data to predict and prevent it. It's something that we can do with the data now. The data is already there and it's just how we make use of that data using technology; and it's cost effective. Something that's easy, effective, and quick.

 

And then we have cataract and glaucoma. My mother in law came to Singapore to have cataract surgery. After the surgery, she still can't see. If we can predict the outcome probability of the surgery, we don't have to waste our resources. So through the data and AI, you can actually predict the outcome of the cataract surgery. Microsoft has the AI, and it can be used easily, it's jut like plug and play. It's not expensive, but very impactful. Portable, easy to use, and quick to implement. By using this AI, you can get the result in three minutes, and there will be doctors on the spot that will advise you on what should you do next. This is very cheap, the AI doesn't differentiate, the rich and poor can get the same treatment; with quick, efficient, low cost, easy to implement.

 

That's how technology becomes a bridge. In hospitals, by utilizing the data, we can predict types of medications, the cost of the medication, and to which doctors we should send this patient to. Using AI, we are also able to predict fraud; we can tell which doctor prescribes excessive medicines, and which patients admitted during the night to cut the queue.

 

As for the last one, I want to share about genomic diseases. We are able to identify the population with a certain types of common standard. They started collecting data to able to diagnose what kind of disease that will be prevalent in the future. So Microsoft has interesting philosophy. What if you can predict an outbreak before it happens? The last one is our philosophy; and we need to start executing it from the small scale, and make the program inclusive.

 

Thank you.