As one of the largest mobile operators in Indonesia, Indosat has the ability to develop cloud computing products including those for health services – something that has yet to be a priority for our local developers. Collaborating with Alcatel-Lucent with its ng Connect as infrastructure provider, Indosat will link various stakeholders in the health industry such as doctors, nurses, and patients, as reported by vivanews.

There will be a mobile application that acts as a connector between the stakeholders with all of the data being stored  online, allowing access from any location at any time. The applications will be developed by Indosat Innovation Lab located at Bandung Institute of Technology. Students will be trained to take advantage of the API by which they will create the applications.

An example of the service offered by Alcatel-Lucent is the ability for doctors to access complete patient records prior to treatment. Additionally, nurses will be able to perform various early care actions using preset directions should the assigned or preferred doctor is not available.

There are still debates overseas regarding online healthcare services such as this. On one hand some still see opportunities in developing these services such as when Dell (who acquired InSite One, a medical image archiving service) collaborated with Microsoft to provide medical records and data archiving service. On the other hand, some have failed to get partners on board to invest and further contribute which caused the closure of Google Health for example, even as a Frost & Sullivan study found that potential revenue from personal health records would rise 33% in 2015.

With the state of disrepair that Indonesia’s health services industry is in, I’m confident that there is still a large opportunity to enter this industry and develop more advanced and functional services. At this moment, this industry is not on top of the list of issues receiving attention from local startups but there is tremendous potential to be harnessed.

By taking this step, Indosat may well open the path for others to follow and peek or even jump in to what is and will be a growth industry. Perhaps Indosat and Alcatel-Lucent can provide guidance or access to API should there be any startup company interested in taking a shot at collaborating.