The application of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the country’s health care sector is necessary, helping raise the sector’s treatment capacity.

The remark was made by experts from the Ministry of Health at a four-day national seminar on improving public services by ICT in the capital city of Hanoi that started on March 16.

The seminar is being held under the umbrella of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the National Information Agency (NIA) of the Republic of Korea and the Asia-Pacific ICT Training Centre.

According to the experts, the country’s health care sector is facing a number of challenges - the aging population, rising chronic diseases and epidemic outbreaks – while health care costs are increasingly going up.

The information link-up at all levels in the health care sector will bring about optimistic results, agreed the experts, adding that the doing will reduce administrative costs and improve the health care services.

The experts reckoned that first and foremost it is a must to build a legal framework and policies related to the ICT application in the sector.

Also, it is obligatory to set up a common database for the sector, linking central with local health care facilities, they added./.