Singapore emerges as best country in personalised healthcare in APAC

The transition to personalised healthcare is gaining momentum across most of Asia Pacific.

Singapore has been hailed as the best-performing country in Asia Pacific in terms of personalised healthcare, according to the Personalised Health Index supported by the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies in partnership with Roche.

Singapore is followed by Taiwan and Japan as second and third, respectively. Rounding out the top five are Australia and South Korea. Indonesia ranked last in the index, followed by India and China.

Personalised healthcare refers to a paradigm shift from a one-size-fits-all treatment of disease, aiming to maintain a high and healthy quality of life by applying the right health interventions for the right person and population in the right place at the right time.

The measures of the index validated by a panel of 15 experts from the selected regions were grouped into four categories. First was the policies, frameworks, partnerships, people, and drivers that will facilitate personalised healthcare.

Second was health information, or the data, infrastructures, and technical expertise that will drive personalised healthcare. Third was personalised technologies, or the devices, applications, platforms, and reimbursement structures that will drive personalised healthcare based on the needs of stakeholders.

Lastly, the planning, organisation, and delivery of services that will drive personalised healthcare was included as a factor for evaluating the performance of each country.

“The expert panellists were tasked with validating measures that the core research team proposed to be adequately representative of a healthcare system’s performance or future readiness for a given area of personalised healthcare,” the whitepaper stated.

The whitepaper noted that the transition towards personalised healthcare is in very early stages across the world, but this transition is well underway and gaining momentum across most of the Asia-Pacific region.

“The emergence of strategies, plans and policies that aim to enable more personalised forms of care suggest that key health stakeholders in the Asia-Pacific are thinking about not only how to improve healthcare for citizens, but also how to build future-proofed health systems that are competitive on regional and even global scales,” the report stated.

Thus, the whitepaper urged for Asia Pacific to develop personalised healthcare strategies with accompanying implementation plans, as well as establish systems for monitoring developments and evaluating progress in personalised healthcare.

“Locations in the Asia-Pacific region should develop fit-for-purpose personalised healthcare strategies and establish monitoring and evaluation systems that regularly take stock of progress and incentivise implementation and accessibility of personalised healthcare,” the report added.

It also advised for the markets to work towards models for interoperability of clinical, -omics, and individually generated data. In particular, the region will have to collaborate to eliminate barriers to the flow of data between healthcare stakeholders and across borders.

“As a part of this, stakeholders should also aim to establish harmonised quality and content standards that are suitable for both clinical and secondary use,” the report added.