Background
Digital technologies have advanced more rapidly than any innovation in our history reaching around 50% of the developing world’s population in only two decades and transforming societies. By enhancing connectivity, financial inclusion, access to trade and public services, technology can be a great equaliser.In the health sector, digital technology become frontier technologies in helping to save lives, diagnose diseases and extend life expectancy. Healthcare has moved from traditional face-to-face time between nurses, physicians and patients to communication through technology such as the electronic health record, computerized provider order entry, email, and pagers. While this change may improve the efficiency of communication, it increases message ambiguity. In education, virtual learning environments and distance learning have opened up programmes to students who would otherwise be excluded. Public services are also becoming more accessible and accountable through blockchain-powered systems, and less bureaucratically burdensome as a result of artificial intelligent assistance.Big data can also support more responsive and accurate policies and programmes.
The journey to future health care will involveadvances mainly in three dimensions (1) advances in health care technology; (2)advances in health care delivery; and (3) advancesin computer science and information technology. Advances in health care technology include breakthroughs in the human genome project, pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals, and medical devices. In health care practice, we have novel methods developed for better disease management, evidence-based health care across the continuum of care, and mind–body medicine. Innovations in computer science and information technology are helping us handle and understand the vast amount of health information (we will use the word IT to denote computer science and information technology). These innovations in health IT (HIT) are being fueled by increases in computational power and storage capacity, mobile personal computing and communication devices (mPCDs), cloud computing, artifcial intelligence, networking, and biometrics. Severalstudiesa have pointed out that properly implemented HIT could result in signifcant savings and improved health care. We briefy describe three revolutions that are important to health care in the twenty-frst century.
With those unique characteristics of transformation of healthcare through digital communication and technology, collaborations between lecturer, researcher, government and stakeholders among health, social and computer sciences are highly needed. In doing so, there is a necessity for sharing innovative thinking and discourse regarding transformation of healthcare. Therefore, Universitas Perintis Indonesia is conducting the first International Conference on Digital Technology, Pharmacy, Health and Social Sciences with special topic is Transforming Healthcare through Digital Communication and Technology. The main objective of this conference is to enhance the discourse and share innovative thinking about transformation of healthcare among lecturers, researchers, practitioners and bureaucrats. It is also aimed to discuss potential future cooperation initiatives around healthcare, communication and digital technology related issues.