Covid pandemic exposed gaps in digital health system, says health official

Senior health ministry official Mahesh Appannan said Malaysia needs to redesign healthcare services to make them more predictive, preventive, personalised and participatory, with patients placed at the centre of the system. (Bernama pic)KUALA LUMPUR: The Covid-19 pandemic exposed major weaknesses in Malaysia’s healthcare system, including fragmented patient records and a continued reliance on manual processes, a senior health ministry official revealed.“The crisis did not create the need for digital transformation, but it exposed how we were not ready,” Mahesh Appannan said during a panel discussion on Malaysia’s private healthcare delivery at the Sasana Symposium 2026 here today.Mahesh said the ministry began working on digital health long before the pandemic, but Covid-19 accelerated efforts to strengthen the country’s digital healthcare infrastructure.He said Malaysia now needed to redesign healthcare services to make them more predictive, preventive, personalised and participatory, with patients placed at the centre of the system.Mahesh said the ministry had almost 1,000 separate systems, many of which were developed independently and could not exchange information.This resulted in patients’ medical records being scattered across government hospitals, private healthcare facilities and online healthcare services.“The physical reality is that the patient moves from one system to another, but the data never moves,” he said.He said the fragmented data could force doctors to spend time obtaining basic medical information from patients, including their previous diagnoses and the medicines they were taking.As of 2023, only 22 of the ministry’s 150 hospitals were digitised, while about 100 health clinics and 78 dental clinics had some form of digital system.Despite the 22 hospitals adopting a digital system, “none of these hospitals speak to each other”.He said the ministry had changed its approach by subscribing to established systems instead of attempting to build every platform internally.“Digital health is currently a market-driven industry. Why reinvent the wheel?” he said.The ministry aims to equip all 2,900 government primary healthcare facilities with electronic medical records by the end of the first quarter of 2027, and all government hospitals by 2029.Mahesh said the longer-term objective was to realise the concept of “one person, one record”, allowi…