The Economist on Jan. 28 in Singapore held a webinar on building long-term sustainable and personalized health care systems and published the Personalized Health Index, a first for the Asia Pacific region. The index is compiled by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies and a panel of 15 experts from across the Asia Pacific region. The findings show that Taiwan ranks second in Asia Pacific, just behind Singapore, with Japan taking third place, followed by Australia, South Korea and China ranking 9th out of 11.
Gau Churn-shiouh a former executive director of Taiwan's Center for Drug Evaluation and a professor in the School of Pharmacy at National Taiwan University and one of the 15 experts, said that the index measures nations’ progress towards personalized medicine based on 27 indicators including capacities in health information, health services, personalized technologies and policy context.
Gau attributed Taiwan’s strong showing in the rankings to the solid foundation built over the past decades including the National Health Insurance data base and the National Taiwan Cancer Registry, which have laid a strong foundation.
However, there is still has much room for improvement in speeding up new medicine applications, Gau said.
