KUALA LUMPUR, June 21 – The Ministry of Health (MOH) has recently received approval from the Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC) to start price negotiations for the MySejahtera app.
Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin today said the government has not made any payments for the use of MySejahtera to date.
“We’ve yet to make any payment (for MySejahtera). The MOH has just received permission from the AGC to conduct price negotiations, so we are in that process now,” Khairy told a media briefing following an engagement session with hospital directors at the Hospital Directors Conference in Petaling Jaya today.
Upon completion of the price negotiation process, the matter will be forwarded to the Finance Ministry and the Cabinet to be finalised.
In March, Khairy said the MOH’s discussions with MySJ Sdn bhd – which received MySejahtera’s software licence and intellectual property rights from the app developer, Entomo Malaysia Sdn Bhd (formerly known as KPISoft Malaysia) – revolved around the management of the platform, or provision of software as a service.
Khairy also said that the negotiation price will be “much much lower” than RM300 million – the approximate amount involved in Entomo Malaysia’s five-year transfer deal with MySJ, according to court documents from a dispute among MySJ shareholders.
Earlier this month, Khairy shared plans at a Singaporean event to scale up use of the contentious national mobile app beyond Covid-19, which includes the transfer of immunisation records for children and the use of anonymised MySejahtera user data and health records by third-party entities.
The health minister told the 75th World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, that some 30 million people in Malaysia have downloaded MySejahtera, as he envisioned “light” portable electronic health records on the app that could be taken to various physicians and to book medical check-ups for non-communicable disease.
Khairy also spoke in Singapore about the need to have government builds, such as the MySejahtera app, to have “plug and play” adaptability with other digital systems, equipment, programmes, and devices.
