Digital Medicine, Genetic Information, and Health Technology Assessment

Few aspects of society are being transformed by technology more than health and medical care, with health systems challenged to finance and deliver affordable access to a burgeoning array of technologies enabling longer, healthier lives. In this webinar, three speakers address different and complementary aspects of how several Asian health systems create, evaluate, and regulate transformative technologies.

Dr. Sachiko Masuda, a Visiting Scholar at Shorenstein APARC for the 2021-22 academic year and an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, probes policies that govern domestic and cross-border control and the sharing of genetic information for medical innovation. Masuda's research focuses on legal systems, regulations, infrastructure and industrial structures necessary for advances in technology and a safer society, especially in the pharmaceutical and medical fields.

Dr. Jeonghoon Ahn, an expert on health technology assessment (HTA) and health economics, discusses health technology assessment (HTA) for pricing and reimbursement decisions in three countries: South Korea, where there is a young yet established HTA program, compared to Japan, where a 3-year HTA pilot program has just concluded, and China, where HTA efforts are underway but have not been formally implemented. Dr. Ho also discusses the emergence of digital medicine that enables individualized patient treatment, aiming to increase accessibility to personalized, precision medicine while reducing healthcare costs. Dr. Ahn is a full professor at the Ewha Womans University (Seoul, Korea) and an adjunct fellow at the National Evidence-based healthcare Collaborating Agency.

Professor Dean Ho shares insights from his collaborative work that successfully developed and validated CURATE.AI, a powerful digital medicine platform that has optimized human treatment for broad indications ranging from oncology to infectious diseases. Prof. Ho is the Provost’s Chair Professor, Director of The N.1 Institute for Health (N.1), Director of The Institute for Digital Medicine (WisDM) and Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the National University of Singapore.

This event is part of the 2022 Winter webinar series, "New Frontiers: Technology, Politics, and Society in the Asia-Pacific," sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.