Ministry of Health’s mission for a healthier Indonesia

The Ministry of Health has recently launched the Biomedical & Genome Science Initiative (BGSi), which is the first initiative in Indonesia to provide precise medicine services through the use of technology to collect genetic information from humans and pathogens such as viruses and bacteria or whole genome sequencing (WGS). This method has played an essential role in the prevention of the further spread of COVID-19 in Indonesia.

During the East Ventures Summit 2022, Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said that the Indonesian health sector is facing two challenges: the rising healthcare costs per capita and the fact that the healthcare system is mainly focused on the curative side instead of the preventive side. To overcome these challenges, the Ministry launched a blueprint in December 2021 which lays out two significant health reforms: healthcare info-technology and healthcare biotechnology. The launch of BGSi is part of the biotechnology reform.

According to the Ministry of Health, health data fragmentation, caused by high numbers of health applications and a lack of data standardization regulations, is a major issue in the health industry in Indonesia. The Ministry, as explained in the blueprint, is working towards a better collaboration with all health stakeholders in Indonesia under the Indonesia Health Services (IHS) platform, a digital health ecosystem platform that provides data connectivity, analysis, and services to support and integrate various health applications in Indonesia.

By Jasmin Andriani, August 2022