The late Dr A Jai Mohan, with several others, including Dr Sarvanathan from the Ministry of Health (MOH), once assembled a group of core team members to steer the first Total Health Information System (THIS) project in Malaysia, with Selayang Hospital planned to be the first tertiary hospital to make use of THIS, with Hospital Pandan and Hospital Putrajaya next.
Dr Jai Mohan, myself, and several others, patiently and diligently went through trying times to get various health care and hospital-based practices and processes to migrate from a paper-based system to a fully electronic system.
Oracle, IBM, and People Soft were some of the competing systems in the open market which we had to get to work together to support Powerchart and other IT applications back then.
Beyond hospital care, concepts such as Life Health Informatics, Life-Long Health Care System, Life Health Records, Life-Time Healthcare Plan, and Care-Sets, were introduced and efforts were put in place to integrate pre hospital community-based care with hospital care to make health access and health records more timely, simplified, and seamless.
Those were the days in Wisma Awal where we slogged together to make it happen. Selayang Hospital, once the nation’s proud model of the first proof of concept of the THIS application globally, is now in an IT system shambles. Various other tertiary hospitals are also in a state of disarray. Our hard work and sacrifices to make the THIS application work at Hospital Selayang have simply evaporated into thin air.
Dr Jai Mohan was a graceful, soft-spoken, and patient man. He was also a team leader and a team player. My condolences to his family.
Dr Ghazali Ahmad is a consultant nephrologist.
- This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of CodeBlue.
