Exploring Common Digital Health Challenges

China and the UK may be separated by many thousands of miles but, as a recent Royal Society of Medicine event proved, these are two countries facing similar digital health obstacles and opportunities. “It’s a promising but challenging job for our team to build this learning health system,” explains Kong. “It’s not easy for healthcare organisations to share patient data and there are ethical and legal issues.” But Kong is based in China – she’s an associate research professor at Peking University’s National Institute of Health Data Science – and the project on which she and her colleagues are working is for the district of Ningbo City, in the country’s Zhejiang province. It goes to show that while the UK and China may be separated by 5,000 miles, the digital health opportunities and challenges being faced in each nation are very similar. NHS England leaders, meanwhile, hope that the national health data platform built to deal with Covid-19 will support effective use of staff capacity in the recovery phase. “We’ve worked with trusts to bring together the data that they have from the electronic records into the data platform,” explained Ming Tang, chief data and analytics officer for NHS England and NHS Improvement. Of course it is not only those working in healthcare systems who have become more familiar with the use of digital over the past two years. Feng Zhang, product director of Medlinker Internet Hospital – an integrated healthcare platform with 62 ‘departments’ – explained that on Chinese New Year 2020 (25 January) “daily active users for Internet Hospital platforms increased 1.4 million compared with 2019”. “During the height of Covid, we had about 350 million users using our many programs in healthcare,” explained Alex Ng, vice president of Tencent Healthcare. I think this is a really exciting development of how we might be able to use real time reporting of symptoms for general health service use.” A company showcase that rounded off the second of the sessions, meanwhile, profiled a range of organisations aiming to find ways to support clinical decision making, improve outcomes, and connect healthcare data more effectively.