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I’m sorry for the long-winded post, this topic is exactly what I’m working on right now with Ethnic Health Strategy development and I am very passionate about this topic.
The situation of health informatics workforce in Myanmar is underdeveloped. Myanmar has a low-income economy and limited resources, and this may affect the development of the health informatics workforce.
The country is facing many challenges related to the development of health informatics workforce:
Lack of education and training: The lack of education and training in health informatics in Myanmar can be attributed to a number of factors. One major factor is that there are limited educational opportunities and resources available to train professionals in this field. There are very few universities or institutions in Myanmar that offer formal training or education in health informatics. This means that there are very few professionals in the country who have the knowledge and skills to work with health information systems.
Additionally, many healthcare providers in Myanmar have limited access to continuing education and professional development opportunities, which makes it difficult for them to stay current with advances in health informatics. This lack of training and education can make it difficult for healthcare providers to effectively use and implement health information systems, which can limit their ability to provide high-quality care.
Limited access to technology: The limited access to technology is a significant challenge facing the development of the health informatics workforce in Myanmar. The country has a relatively low level of economic development and limited resources, which can make it difficult to invest in and maintain the technology and infrastructure needed to support the use of health information systems.
Many healthcare providers in Myanmar may lack access to basic infrastructure, such as reliable electricity and internet connectivity, which can make it difficult to use and maintain electronic health records and other health information systems. Additionally, many healthcare providers may lack access to the necessary hardware and software to support the use of health information systems, such as computers and servers, as well as specialized software and applications.
Addressing this challenge will require significant investment in technology and infrastructure, as well as training and education to ensure that healthcare providers have the knowledge and skills needed to effectively use and maintain health information systems.
Limited resources: The country is classified as a low-income economy and has limited resources to invest in the development of the health informatics workforce. This can make it difficult to attract and retain qualified professionals in this field and to invest in the technology and infrastructure needed to support the use of health information systems.
Limited resources may also mean that there is a lack of funding for education and training initiatives in health informatics, which can make it difficult to develop the necessary skills and knowledge among healthcare providers to effectively use and implement health information systems.
Additionally, limited resources also mean that there is a lack of funding for the maintenance and support of existing health information systems, which can lead to systems becoming outdated and unreliable, which can limit their effectiveness.
Inadequate regulations and standardization: The lack of regulations and standards can make it difficult to ensure the quality and security of health information, which can limit the effectiveness of health information systems and the ability of healthcare providers to provide high-quality care.
One of the major challenges is that there are no clear regulations or guidelines in place for the collection, storage, and use of health information in Myanmar. This lack of regulation can make it difficult to ensure that health information is accurate, complete, and protected from unauthorized access or misuse.
Another major challenge is that there are no standardization in the way health information is collected and stored, which can make it difficult for healthcare providers to effectively use and share health information. Without standardization, it can be difficult to integrate data from different sources, making it difficult to develop a comprehensive view of a patient’s health.
Additionally, the lack of standardization can also make it difficult to ensure the interoperability of health information systems, which can limit the ability of healthcare providers to share information and collaborate effectively.
Cultural and linguistic barriers: The country is a multi-ethnic country, and there are many different languages spoken in the country, which can make it difficult to develop and implement health information systems that are accessible to all communities.
One major challenge is that many healthcare providers in Myanmar may not be proficient in the languages spoken by their patients, which can make it difficult to effectively communicate and provide care. Additionally, many healthcare providers may not be familiar with the cultural beliefs and practices of their patients, which can make it difficult to provide culturally appropriate care.
Another major challenge is that many healthcare providers may not be proficient in English, which is the language used by many health information systems. This can make it difficult for healthcare providers to understand and use these systems, which can limit their effectiveness.
Lack of awareness: Many healthcare providers and policymakers in Myanmar may not be aware of the benefits that health informatics can bring to healthcare delivery, which can make it difficult to secure investment and support for the development of this field.
One major challenge is that many healthcare providers may not be aware of the benefits that health informatics can bring to their practice, such as increased efficiency and improved patient outcomes, which can make it difficult to secure their support for the implementation of health information systems.
Another major challenge is that policymakers may not be aware of the importance of investing in the development of the health informatics workforce, which can make it difficult to secure funding and support for education and training initiatives in this field.
The challenges related to the development of the health informatics workforce in Myanmar are complex and multifaceted and need to be addressed through a combination of investment in education, training, and infrastructure, and the development of regulations and standards.
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In my opinion, the health informatics workforce in Thailand is underdeveloped, but is still growing. The challenges of developing the health informatics workforce are provided below.
1. Recognition of the importance of health informatics. To be honest, there are many people who do not know what health informatics is, what kinds of health informatics work, and what benefits the hospital from hiring health informaticians.
2. Very high cost of implementation of health informatics implementation. In order to work on informatics, the organization must have many kinds of information technology, for instance, central servers, client computers, and network systems. They are very high cost for some hospitals, especially public hospitals.
3. Need for multidisciplinary knowledge. To be a health informatician, one must have basic knowledge, including medicine, computer science, and data science. Furthermore, soft skills, such as leadership and teamwork, are also important.
4. There are quite few training programs. There are few training programs in health informatics in Thailand. In addition, a small number of universities and colleges have education staff in health informatics. Another reason may be that it needs multiple staff from different specialties.
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My country has a narrow of health informaticians and is facing a lack of influx to this profession. This position seems unpopular due to the shortage of participating students in this particular educational program and the unmet workforce planning supply.
Over the last two decades, Indonesia’s labor force has been shifting from high school to undergraduate holders. However, although health informatics could also be part of majors in public health undergraduate programs, but students participating in this program are always countable and rare. To illustrate based on my own experience, among 234 students in the same cohort, those who select health informatics were only 4%.
Limited research to forecast the future digital health, to assess workforce needs, and to review the distribution of health informatics graduated students are other prime causes, which affect unmet planning for this profession. For instance, in my ministerial agency, there is no professional nomenclature on health informaticians. Professions with similar job descriptions are overlapping, such as data analytics, statisticians, and data managers. In the private sector, hospital tends to recruit IT professionals and medical records officers though they need to understand health care and organizational behavior. Companies and startups, including those who invest in health, are now recruiting data scientists or data analysts who are focusing on making predictions.
To conclude, participating students and workforce planning are the two shortcomings that make health informatics prospects seem not marketable. I personally suggest that we can start by creating a better ecosystem of health informatics students and bringing research evidence into advocacy for careful labor planning.
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We have similar situation in Myanmar but the critical difference is that some health leaders in Myanmar are very old fashioned. After the COVID-19 pandemic a lot of meetings moved online (depending on the nature of the meeting of course) but there are some health leaders who still insist in-person meetings because they are still not comfortable with Zoom. So, in my situation, I would have to change those mindsets from the top. We have a long way to go 🙁
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Health informatics is a field that includes a diverse range of professionals, including those who specialize in health information management, clinical informaticians, IT experts, data analysts and scientists, project managers, and educators. However, in my country, there is a general lack of awareness and understanding of the field among the general population, which has led to fewer individuals interest and go for education and training in health informatics.
Another challenge facing the health informatics workforce in my country is the limited availability of education and training programs in the field. This results in a shortage of professionals with the necessary skills and knowledge to work in health informatics.
As technology in the field of health informatics continues to advance, there is a growing need for healthcare plus IT professionals to stay update with new technologies, which can be costly and require ongoing professional development. Additionally, the interdisciplinary nature of health informatics requires collaboration and effective communication among healthcare professionals, IT specialists, project managers, and other experts, which can be challenging.
I honestly did not have a board knowledge on this situation, thus the above details are from my perspective. Please feel free to add comments or advise as appropriate. Thank you.
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From my perceived experience, I sense that many hospital administrators are beginning to know buzz words like “big data” or “AI” and feel that their data can be immensely useful, but they still do not know where to find the right person to be a manager in this field. Therefore, many potential hospitals are trying to send their personnel to learn about health informatics. For example, in this class, there are many people who are sent by an organization to bring knowledge back to develop their businesses. However, I think that’s just what I’ve learned personally, which can’t properly answer the overall situation of the country.
I have read the paper of Ajarn Nawanan. That paper was published in 2011 on the topic of Thai hospitals’ adoption of information technology: a theory development and nationwide survey (THAIS). Ajarn concluded that “Basic IT adoption in Thai hospitals appears to have passed the tipping point. Focus should be on adoption of more advanced technologies (such as comprehensive EHRs and clinical decision support systems) and ensuring that adoption translates into
better processes and outcomes, as well as addressing barriers to health information
exchange.”After that, I searched for information on the topic of health informatics in Google Trends for the past 10 years in Thailand. It has been found to have been searching for this term regularly over the past 10 years, but its popularity tends to be moderate to low. the searched provinces are quite a few, most of which are large provinces such as Nakhon Pathom, Songkhla, Khon Kaen, Chiang Mai and Bangkok (pictured below).
As for the challenging topics, I think are the following.
– People still don’t know what health is health informatics.
– Unclear boundary between pure IT and informatics
– Lack of knowledge about the career path of health informatician
– Lack of widespread training on basic knowledge of health information.
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Thank you for sharing such a interesting trend.
I’m curious that the province that the search is popular is quite related to the province that own the medical school. Do you agree? -
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Thanks for sharing Google Trends. You inspired me to look at the Google trend for Myanmar but I got the reply from Google that “your search doesn’t have enough data to show here.” It seems people in Myanmar doesn’t even search health informatics that much. We have a long way to go but thanks for the inspiration.
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Based on my experience as a Pharmacist in Private settings outside of Bangkok, I would say that Health informatics hasn’t been widely recognized as a required role in organizations. Health and Technology related jobs are separated by Healthcare and IT respectively. It’s rare to see a person who works with both Technology and Health. At a glance, I assume that this is because the main focus of healthcare staff is patient management, which possibly takes up all the working hours, and the limiting of assigned positioning in the healthcare units, which therefore couldn’t provide informaticians. However, there are many related challenges listed below which compose of barriers to development within the health informatician workforce and health informatics itself.
The health information system (HIS) application, such as EMR/EHR, telehealth, mHealth, couldn’t be accessed by a large population or are limited/fragmented by organizations. This could lead to the slower system development and smaller demand for health informaticians.
Skills and knowledge related to HIS haven’t been recognized among healthcare workers. HIS topics such as Privacy Security and Interoperability aren’t prioritized study subjects for healthcare students and professionals. Therefore, Health workers might not realize the need for and importance of health informatic in health systems.
From eHealth Strategy, Ministry of Public Health (2017 – 2026). There are many strategies dedicated to eHealth transformation which would mitigate the challenges above such as nationwide HIS application and workforce capability support. However, this is the 1st edition of eHealth Strategy of Thailand, so it will probably take time, resources and abilities to reach such goals in real situations.
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In my opinion, the status of the health informatician is not well-established in Thailand.
I heard some of existing role in the government sector and private sector as well. However, the popularity of this role is quite limited. Even I am the pharmacist which is one of the HCPs, I did not know a lot about this role.
In Thailand, the well-accepted career are quite the same with other Asian countries: doctor, dentist, pharmacist, engineer, accountant, lawyer. The IT-related career is not quite popular.
I think we have a gap for raising awareness for IT-related career including health informatician as well. Apart from raising awareness for the career, the building the ecosystem for the health informatician is important as well. In Thailand, the current market for health informatician is gradually growing as the era of big data is coming.In conclusion, the role of this profession is gradually growing for both emerging and existing workforce. The awareness is gradually growing as well.
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To be honest, prior to start studying BHI, health informatics was new to me.
From my perspective, health informatics in Thailand has not yet broaden and well-known. When I was a pharmacy student, nobody told me about roles of informaticians or how we participate in EMR. There is no chance of having an internship in this field. I think to have a greater health informatics workforce in the country, we should have a better educational program specially to cultivate bachelor’s degree students.
If we once introduce them, at least they know what health informatics is. Thus, those who interested to continue pursuing their career as health informaticians can seek for any opportunities such as internship program or master’s degree.In summarize, I think the challenges in my country are no cultivations of interest among individuals, lack of knowledges and skills for IT or healthcare professionals to work on health informaticians, career path opportunities, and educational program and training.
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In your opinion, what is the situation of health informatics workforce in your country? What are the challenges regarding this issue?In Thailand, we probably have heard terms about “data, big data” more frequently in past few years. The trend about data-driven decision becomes more and more popular. In health care sector, most data collected from the HIS system is still managed and maintained mostly by system administrator — specifically the IT personnel. Hence, the data is neither being used nor utilised. One of the reasons is that it is a data about health care and other professions won’t understand them, not to mention the privacy and confidentiality concerns.
This situation has been like this for decades, until the Health Informatician emerged and filled the gap between them.
It is a work in progress and requires training by multidisciplinary team to create a health informatician. It also is a new field of study where not so many institutions offer a proper training programme. Saying that we are the pioneer in this field is rather not overrated. I agree, as well as many of you that one day we will become well-known and being recognised by people in the very near future. -
In my opinion, even though in some part of Thailand has developed and implemented health information technology to their system, overall knowledge and supply is still inadequate and has a long way to go.
As it is still preferable level not mandatory level and depend on local investment.Challenge#1 The importance of health informatics This refers to government support and also individual perspective. We currently have professionals in the field in national level and they all know how importance of it but people doesn’t, in general. Governance should highlight, acknowledge and promote more to the public and also support and invest in technology implementation nation wide. For individual, for example, in the college or university, we should put this field in the educational guidance, let students know its existence, it might start in related program such as health care, data science or IT field, that they can extend their knowledge into the health informatics field and get a job.
Challenge#2 Health informaticians community I believe there is still limited professionals in health informatician in Thailand. Since we still in developing and implementing health informatic system nation wide. With the human resources limitation, someone with potential, could be IT guy or physician, has been picked up and chosen to do this thing but not a well-trained person at the beginning. So, there might be lack of continuity and synchronicity in a way to run system smoothly. In the future, if there are more professionals and related in the field, whether they are trained aboard or in Thai and they pack together to form community and share resources in person or online, this could help and support health informatics workforce in every aspect. Also, we can spread the basic knowledge of health information usage to public users, since we are living in the era of information and technology.
Challenge#3 Training program in Thailand As I know, now we have probably less than 10 programs in health informatics and related in Thailand. So in general, we are still small group of people and inadequate resource available but I strongly believe that with the trend in healthcare combined with data science technology and digital transformation technology these days, this field will rapidly grow and expand. I think every health organization should provide at least tier 1 for all the staff involve in the health system.
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In my opinion, more skilled informatics skills are needed as the health informatics workforce in my country is not well established.
The lack of qualified professionals is one of the main challenges facing the health informatics workforce. This is especially true in countries where health informatics is still in its infancy and there are not enough seasoned professionals to teach and mentor the next generation of workers. The quality of healthcare delivery and the ability of healthcare organizations to keep up with the latest developments in the field can be affected by this shortfall, which can lead to a lack of investment in health informatics and slow adoption of new technologies and practices.
The need to keep up with rapidly changing technology is another obstacle that the health informatics workforce must overcome. To remain competitive and deliver high-quality care, healthcare organizations and staff must be able to rapidly adapt to new technologies and processes in the field of healthcare informatics. Health is changing rapidly. Ensure that the workforce is informed of the latest developments in the field and that education and training requirements are updated continuously.
In addition to these challenges, the growth of the health informatics workforce may be hindered by cultural and regulatory barriers. For example, cultural or political factors may hinder the adoption of new technologies and practices.
Health IT professionals may also find it difficult to collaborate and share information due to regulatory restrictions on sharing health information between organizations. In summary, cultural and regulatory barriers, a lack of skilled professionals, and the need to keep up with rapidly changing technology all pose significant barriers to the health informatics workforce. In my opinion, investments in health informatics workforce development, continuing education, and training, and supporting the adoption of new technologies and practices are critical to healthcare organizations, governments, and professional organizations.
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