Malaysia’s vision for health is to be a nation of healthy individuals, families and communities based on meeting the following 8 characteristics: Wellness focus, Person focus, Informed persons, Self-help, Care provided at convenient locations, Seamless and continuous care, Service personalisation, and efficient/affordable services
To achieve the vision, primary healthcare will be the thrust of Malaysian Healthcare system. This vision will be supported by secondary care services, which are devolved and regionalised tertiary care services.
This idea is reflected in the Ministry of Health (MOH) Policy Direction for 2013-2016 with the following objectives;
• Strengthening Public Health care (e.g. Family doctor, preventive care)
• Public Private Integration (e.g. Engage GPs)
• Community empowerment (e.g. Working with other stakeholders, self-empowerment)
• Care closer to home (e.g. Domiciliary care, step-down care)
• Achieving universal access to quality health care;
• Enhancing targeted support particularly for the underserved
• Improving system delivery for better health outcome
• Expanding capacity to increase accessibility
• Intensifying collaboration with private sector and NGOs to increase health awareness.
OpenGov recently spoke to Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, Director General of Health Malaysia about their current areas of focus, the Malaysian Health Data Warehouse, and how healthcare may use ICT as a business driver in an integrated and quality health services.
Strategies for the 11th Malaysia Plan and the Malaysian Health Data Warehouse
As Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah told us, the current areas of focus and the focus for the next 1-3 years are reflected in the areas/strategies for the 11th Malaysia Plan. This includes the following:
• Strengthening Primary Healthcare
• Health System Delivery and Work Process Reengineering
• Human Resource and Organisational Capacity and Development
• Infrastructure Planning and Development
• ICT Transformation for health
• Public-Private/Inter-agency Collaboration
• Enhancing Healthcare Financing Mechanism
• Creating a Healthy Ecosystem towards healthy lifestyle and disease prevention.
The highlight of what Ministry of Health (MOH) is currently working on includes the National Health System Transformation, Development of Malaysian Health Data Warehouse (MyHDW), and Strengthening of eHealth.
These projects operate in collaboration with MIMOS. MIMOS, government’s ICT research agency, deals with research in ICT and produce patent ICT product. The MyHDW is the first project that will showcase the functionality of the patent ICT product.
National Health System Transformation agenda is a restructured national healthcare system that is responsive and provides choices for quality healthcare, ensuring universal coverage for healthcare needs of population based on solidarity and equity and the component emphasis on service delivery, financing and organisational.
The MyHDW is a trusted source of truth of comprehensive healthcare data structured for query and analysis purposes. The national data warehouse will be developed in phases to collect, consolidate and analyse secondary used data from all healthcare providers in the country.
“MOH is the pioneer for Data Warehouse in Malaysia by using more than 90% local technology (MIMOS) and incorporating technology to handle unstructured data,” Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah told us.
This data warehouse will work to improve health data management, support R&D and innovation initiatives- as well as provide quality service delivery to the citizens.
The MyHDW will have the following characteristics:
• Dedicated system that is optimised for analysis and reporting
• Data is integrated, interoperable and comprehensive
• Build based on national health informatics standards
• Employs an overarching healthcare system governance
• Information available in 'right time'
• Employs the notion of 'build once use many' with the objective of reducing the burden of data collection and processing
• Aligning primary and secondary usage consideration
• Support many reporting and analysis tools and interfaces
• Data Quality is of the highest level and will be supported through appropriate methods, tools and techniques
• Implements secure and privacy sensitive access
The Malaysian Health Data Warehouse (MyHDW) is built based on MIMOS technology with emphasis on the government-owned security system.
It will have a scalable platform on the application that collect encounter data from all healthcare facilities and that feed into the data warehouse.
To include harmonisation of data and codification to SNOMED CT to create a parallel SNOMED CT-coded database along with the existing database.
Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullahemphasised to us that healthcare data comes from 20% structured data and 80% of unstructured data. The technology is currently geared towards securing structured data.
“With the implementation of MiHarmony, MyHDW will be able to generate more of unstructured data. Further development of MyHDW will cater for the Business Intelligence that provides a function for self-service query so that easier and faster access of information for policy decision making,” Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah stated.
“In the later period when the Patient Registry Information System (PRIS) is in place it will facilitate faster and better clinical decision making.”
We continue our two part interview with Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, Director General of Health Malaysia tomorrow…