The COVID-19 pandemic completely catalysed how the healthcare industry uses technology. Healthcare organizations turned to the cloud to quickly adapt to the pandemic’s disruption, driving innovation in telemedicine, digital health, medical research, and clinical care. New technologies that had previously taken years to develop were completed and launched in days and weeks using the cloud. With the accelerated gains made in the last two years, the healthcare industry in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) can harness this momentum of digitization to address issues beyond the pandemic, like ageing populations, increasing chronic disease prevalence, and the rising cost of healthcare.

To better understand the challenges and opportunities in digital healthcare adoption, think tank ACCESS Health International and the AWS Institute – a thought leadership and executive education program for public sector executives from Amazon Web Services (AWS) – interviewed 39 policymakers, healthcare chief information officers (CIOs), chief medical informatics officers (CMIOs), and digital health experts in order to understand government and industry perspectives on cloud adoption for public healthcare. The findings are presented in the “Overcoming Barriers to Cloud Adoption in Public Healthcare in the Asia-Pacific” report, released by AWS and ACCESS Health today.

The research, conducted in 12 countries across APJ (Australia, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam), shows that government and healthcare leaders have an incredible opportunity to unleash further innovation in the healthcare industry by following three key steps: create clarity on cloud data governance regulations, develop strong cloud-first policies, and prioritize cloud skills training across the region.