Dr. Li Yu-chuan, Distinguished Professor at the College of Medical Science and Technology, Taipei Medical University, said that Taiwan has the best and most comprehensive medical database in the world. That is due to Taiwan’s National Health Insurance (NHI) system, which has been storing the medical data of the nation’s population of 23 million under a single database during the past 25 years. By contrast, other countries that have a single-payer healthcare system such as England, Canada, Australia and France have been storing medical data under separate databases and different data formats, making interexchange of data impossible.
Further, with Taiwanese averaging 15 medical consultations each year, efforts toward multidimensional measurements have indirectly been helped by the many data points that can be gleaned from these consultations that encompass medical examinations, diagnosis and drug prescriptions, which are all conducive towards development of artificial intelligence-powered medical applications.
Taiwan’s prowess in medical data analysis is not only limited to the above. Li pointed out that there are very few countries like Taiwan where data entry is directly done by physicians. Li noted that in most cases, physicians only type a few words with the rest of the data entry being done by programmers. Li said that following the establishment of the NHI system, physicians have been inputting the data entries personally, which have elevated the quality of data being collected from diagnostics, drug regimens, examination quality and general medical record keeping. The medical records are of exceedingly good quality and reflect patients’ conditions accurately with very little error.
Concurrently, the National Health Insurance Administration, which has been reviewing the medical records of around 2.5 million individuals each year, have benefited from the accuracy of the medical records. Taiwan’s regulations require drug prescriptions to fit diagnoses and reject reimbursements and issue fines when discrepancies are found. In the U.S., commercial health insurers are not concerned patients’ diagnoses and inspect on what drugs are prescribed, resulting in many inaccurate entries on diagnoses data entries. Due to these factors, Taiwan’s medical data is deemed as high quality and trustworthy.
Regarding the future of AI-powered medical applications, Li emphatically listed the concerns of preventing overworking of physicians and lowering of medical errors.
According to Li’s estimation, the adoption of AI solutions could halve the amount of medical errors. The World Health Organization estimate that medical errors related to drug prescriptions cost around US$400 billion annual. Therefore, AI solutions could save at least US$200 billion in avoidable costs. Continued advancements in medical AI would not only minimize medical errors as well as make pandemic containment efforts more comprehensive.
【2020-05-05 / United Daily News】
