Application of a double-loop learning approach for healthcare systems design in an emerging market

The healthcare industry is driven by multiple stakeholders including health ministries, private and public hospitals, and vendors who provide technology to the patients, with each of them playing important health system roles in order to balance high quality and accessibility with cost-effectiveness and sustainability¹. This becomes particularly important for chronic cardiovascular disease patients in emerging markets such as Malaysia where sophisticated advanced therapy are often too costly for the underserved patient population. These patients most often live very far from major hospitals and rely on subsidies from the Ministry of Health (MOH) for a significant portion of their healthcare. Thus worldwide, vendors face a unique challenge in delivering cost effective, affordable and accessible therapy to this patient demographic in emerging markets. This paper presents our findings on the challenges to delivering continuous care to the remote heart failure patients in Malaysia. We will also report the work in progress in applying a Double-Loop Learning approach as a collaboration model with the MOH, its cardiac centers, and a multinational medical technology company to mitigate the challenges faced by Malaysia healthcare providers by the design of a real-time embedded system applying artificial intelligence method to realize the Connected Health concept.