Huawei Backs NU in Sharia-Based MSMEs’ Digital Push
Huawei Backs NU in Sharia-Based MSMEs’ Digital Push
Jakarta. Huawei Indonesia, the local arm of the Chinese technology giant, has pledged its support for the Nahdliyin Entrepreneurs’ Community, or HPN, a business group part of Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization Nahdlatul Ulama, or NU, to accelerate the digital transformation among the Sharia-based business ness, the company said in a recent statement.
Jacky Chen, Huawei’s Indonesia’s chief executive officer, announced the support at HPN Digital Business Forum held in Bali from March 26-28. Vice President Maruf Amin and Said Aqil Siraj, Nahdlatul Ulama’s chairman, also attended the forum.
Under the plan, Huawei Indonesia would help build the technology infrastructures and nurturing digital technology talent among the Sharia-compliant micro-, small-small, and medium-sized businesses in line with the government’s initiatives to leverage the digital and Sharia economy potential for Indonesia’s economic recovery.
“Innovations in utilizing digital technology have actually been going on for some time, being accelerated globally due to the pandemic,” Vice President Maruf said in his remark on Friday.
“Now, we are all part of a global digital community. I invite all parties to develop an incubation center to help aspiring entrepreneurs at all levels in many regions,” Ma’ruf said.
He said the government had a strong commitment to developing the Sharia-compliant economy, focusing on pushing the MSMEs to become part of the global value chain, particularly for the halal goods industry. Apart from that, the government would also seek to develop the Islamic financial industry and Islamic social funds, Ma’ruf said.
Maruf said HPN had a unique position to spearhead the initiative and urge the group to cooperate with various stakeholders, both local governments, industry, and technology providers.
Huawei’s Jacky said the company remains committed to Indonesia and is eager to support the government’s and HPN’s initiatives.
“For over 20 years in Indonesia, Huawei has committed to becoming part of the nation’s journey to transform into a developed country and global digital economy power by 2045,” Jacky said.
“Together with telecommunications companies with Indonesia, we continue to democratize broadband networks even in outermost areas so that the benefits of digital technology can be enjoyed equally,” he said.
“We also develop advanced technologies such as cloud, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data for both direct and industrial use for the sake of Indonesia’s digital ecosystem, including MSMEs and Nahdliyin entrepreneurs,” Jacky said.
He said Huawei would make available the Huawei Asean (Indonesia) Academy, a training facility the company claimed to be its most complete and sophisticated in the Asia Pacific, for training the HPN entrepreneurs.
The company hoped the program would contribute towards the government’s goal to create 9 million digital talents by 2025.
“To support the government’s expectations regarding the availability of capable digital talents by 2025, Huawei targets to develop at least 100,000 digital talents within five years through our collaborative programs with various stakeholders,” Jacky said.
NU’s Said Aqil welcomed Huawei’s support and hoped it would continue building momentum among Sharia entrepreneurs and MSMEs to expand in the digital marketplace.
“Our entrepreneurs need to catch up through digitizing their businesses and adapting to change. They must be part of the digital economy and even play a bigger role for the welfare of the people,” Said Aqil said.
Published at Sun, 28 Mar 2021 10:41:15 +0000
How technology is powering innovation in healthcare
Prior to the pandemic, the healthcare, life sciences, and genomics industries were already looking for ways to use technology and the cloud to advance medical research, drug development, and the entire patient experience, with the goal of improving patient care, advancing precision medicine, and bringing new therapeutics to market faster. What COVID-19 did was simply accelerate these forces.
As the pandemic struck, it was all hands-on deck for every organisation around the world. For us, our primary focus was to provide support to our customers, so they could focus on serving their patients and supporting providers during this crucial time.
The acceleration of IT in healthcare
The pandemic greatly accelerated cloud adoption in the healthcare industry, and this is expected to continue in the year ahead. We’ve seen healthcare organisations lean on technology and the cloud to get accurate, trusted information to patients and either reassure them, or quickly direct them to the appropriate level of care. Technology has also helped direct patients to educational information related to COVID-19, guidance on when to be tested for the virus, and instructions on what to do if they have a confirmed positive result. Furthermore, it has helped streamline research efforts, increased global collaboration, and facilitated vaccine development – all while organisations support their employees working from home.
One example of this is at The Jameel Institute at Imperial College London. They are using cloud technology to accelerate COVID-19 disease modelling work. They provide public health agencies and governments around the globe with real-time estimates to inform the COVID-19 outbreak response, using a combination of machine learning and data science methods. Thanks to the cloud, the Imperial College COVID-19 response team can now store more data, share more information and experiment with different methods in ways not previously possible.
In Spain, the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona is collaborating with AWS to develop an artificial intelligence computational tool to extract and ‘read’ relevant information from scientific articles on COVID-19 at high speed. The tool uses AWS compute and storage services to enable automatic analysis of scientific articles. It allows scientists and researchers around the world to process the huge volume of COVID-19 information at a rate that would not be possible manually. Through this work, they aim to generate an open access drug database for treating COVID-19 and have already identified more than 150 compounds that are potentially active against it.
Driving innovation in the public sector
When the pandemic began, all organisations had to become more flexible and streamline the way they worked in order to get through this crisis. This was especially important for public sector organisations which were working around the clock.
In response to the crisis, we’ve seen public sector organisations turn to the cloud and technology in order to speed up processes – both internally and externally. As a result, we have seen more innovation and movement in the past few months than we have seen over the last two years. The agencies and departments that were positioned to take action were those that didn’t worry about legacy IT; instead, they focused only on their mission.
For example, Nye Health in the UK built a scalable desktop and mobile-based NHS-compliant platform that allows all NHS staff in the UK to offer consultations to patients via video or phone call from any device, anywhere. Using AWS, NYE Health has the flexibility to scale its business quickly and easily and in a secure way to meet the increased demand from clinicians and patients during the COVID-19 crisis. Nye Health’s telephone and video call system is fully encrypted and compliant with NHS Digital standards. The platform currently covers more than 10 million patients and is growing by as much as 150 percent a week, facilitating thousands of virtual/online patient consultations each week.
What’s next?
While we can’t exactly be sure what 2021 will bring, the biggest barrier to ensuring doctors have the most complete medical history on any patient, at every point of their care, is the lack of interoperability among systems preventing data and electronic health records from following a patient throughout their care journey. This results in a fragmented view of a patient’s health history when they meet with physicians or when in need of emergency care.
Bringing this information together is a manual and time-consuming process. But, this is one of those pivotal moments in time when we have an opportunity to identify and work to fix the underlying problems that plague our system, with so many research, health systems, governments, and enterprises pooling efforts and data to better understand and combat COVID-19.
The year ahead provides an opportunity to evaluate interoperability and data sharing approaches to determine how the industry can work together to provide better care and save more lives globally.
Published at Sun, 28 Mar 2021 10:27:00 +0000
