There’s a wealth of data in healthcare that can be used to determine how to manage many other areas. For example, an illness in a geographic area can alert health managers to a problem plaguing people specific to that community. This may have an effect on issues such as productivity and mental health. Solving this problem will have positive economic, social and health benefits.
I find it quite commendable that the Government is now actively moving towards digitising healthcare. This is the direction in which the world is going, some faster than others, and certainly the direction in which this country must go. The COVID-19 pandemic, if nothing else, has shown us how health events and an unhealthy population can have significant negative impact on productivity and life as a whole.
Jamaica has long been engaged in strategies to manage population health. From the establishment of the Extended Programme on Immunisation in 1977 to the 1978 Alma Ata declaration which focused on the need to shore up the primary healthcare system.
Efforts have consistently continued along these lines and, admittedly, we have made much progress over the last few decades.
Although we have seen an improvement in general life expectancy, which was 76 years as at 2016, we seem to be going backwards with the increasing incidence of non-communicable diseases.
