KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 22 — Malaysia’s health care sector must quickly adopt digital solutions to meet rising demands for a streamlined, modernised system, said Dr Maheshwara Rao Appannan, director of the Ministry of Health’s (MOH) digital health division.
“Today, we eat, we sleep, we go to hotels – everything’s digital, right? If I want to eat, I go to Grab Food or Food Panda. For a hotel, it’s Agoda or Booking.com. Now, in health care, people are hungry for change. They’re hungry for a digital front door,” Dr Mahesh told the MIH Megatrends 2024 conference here last October 25, organised by MOH in collaboration with KPJ Healthcare.
Dr Mahesh said investment in digital health is accelerating, with the sector projected to grow at an annual rate of 47.6 per cent over the next five years.
He called for Malaysia to catch up, pointing to the country’s rank of 23rd in Oxford Insights’ Government AI Readiness Index 2023, as North America leads in artificial intelligence (AI) and health care digitisation.
He pointed to Malaysia’s vast but underutilised reserves of health data, from health records to genomic banks and wearable devices.
“Today we use our smartwatch for what? Just 10,000 steps, right? But it also tracks sleep, mood, and heart rate. Imagine getting an alert saying, ‘Hey, Mahesh, your heart rate is high. Go to your nearest physician.’ Wouldn’t you like that?” he asked.
Dr Mahesh also pointed to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on telemedicine and highlighted the need to expand its reach, especially for communities in remote areas. “We need to redefine telemedicine. We need to reach people who are not accessible, who live in remote jungles, like in Sabah and Sarawak.”
He also praised artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT for simplifying tasks, particularly in reducing administrative burdens within government service. “Who doesn’t like large language models? When you need to write a letter, it can go up and down, back and forth, for commas and full stops. With ChatGPT, it’s perfect.”
Despite his call for digital transformation, Dr Mahesh acknowledged that many government clinics and hospitals under the MOH still lack reliable network connectivity.
He urged stakeholders to consider digital health as a long-term investment that extends beyond financial returns.
“People think it’s costly and ask about ROI, but they need to understand opportunity cost,” he said. “How many more opportunities for improved patient outcomes can we create?”
“Be a digital enabler, be a digital driver. Change your analog minds to digital minds.”
