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Innovation and industrial transformation for health improvement in Indonesia
Unprecedented scientific and technological advances have resulted in important industrial transformations, including within the healthcare industry.
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Health workers administer a chest X-ray to a toddler on Feb. 22, 2025 at a community health center (Puskesmas) in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan, under a free TB screening program provided by the city’s health agency. (Antara/Aditya Nugroho)
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nprecedented scientific and technological advances have resulted in important industrial transformations, including within the healthcare industry. Following the industrial revolution in the 19th century, the 20th century saw unprecedented advances and improvement in global health, exemplified by the rise of the global pharmaceutical industry.
In Indonesia, for example, life expectancy increased from 41 in 1951 to 71 in 2023. The current millennium is characterized by the advent of the digital revolution, which promises even more gains for the health of humanity.
The digital revolution within the healthcare industry has been driven by many factors including advances of knowledge in the life sciences, an exponential increase in computer power, the advent of the internet, big data analytics, ubiquity of mobile phones, nanotechnology, and, more recently, the dramatic rise in the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).
Three examples of transformations in the digital era that we are already seeing and will continue to see in the healthcare industry in the future, will be highlighted.
First, transforming and improving health policy through big data analytics. The collection of health data in the past has been problematic and largely limited to data on life expectancy and prevalence of major diseases.
It also suffered from a lack of comparability between countries due to different definitions of disease and limited interoperability of data collecting systems. In order to improve the situation, the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO) initiated, in 1991, the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project.
The GBD now publishes data on the burden of more than 300 diseases and injuries in more than 200 countries around the world every two years, including data for Indonesia, even at the provincial level.
