NEWS Malaysia

The NCKU Overseas Hub in Malaysia in collaboration with the Medical Device Innovation Center (MDIC), National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Taiwan and Malaysian Life Science Accelerator (MyLiSA), Universiti Malaya (UM), Malaysia has organized a webinar on “Digital Health: The Future is Now” on 13^th October 2022. The 90-minutes webinar was moderated by Dr. Kwong Soke Chee (Project Manager, MyLiSA, UM), and joined by three esteemed panellists: Dr. Raymond Choy (CEO of Heydoc International Sdn. Bhd., Malaysia), Prof. Dr. Sok Ching Cheong (Deputy Chief Scientific Officer, Cancer Research Malaysia, Malaysia), and Dr. Tzu-Hsien Yang (Assistant Professor, Dept of Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, NCKU, Taiwan).

Dr. Kwong opened the session by first sharing the meaning of digital health. “Digital health happens when information and communication meet healthcare. According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), this broad term of digital health includes categories such as mobile health, health information technology, wearable devices, telehealth and telemedicine, and also personalized medicine.”. Digital health started to mushroom even before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the pandemic has really accelerated the growth and value of digital health.

The first panelist was Dr. Raymond Choy, founder, and CEO of Heydoc International Sdn. Bhd. or also known as DOC2US. He started his presentation by sharing with the audience about DOC2US journey and his business progression. Dr. Raymond agreed that COVID-19 has accentuated the significance of adopting digital services, especially in digital healthcare. He shared the fact that the downloads for medical applications grew by 50% year to year due to the pandemic, and the global digital healthcare market has an expected growth of 28.6% from year 2020 to 2026. He later presented the data of DOC2US number of E-prescriptions from 2017 to August 2022. There was an increase of >160% of E-prescriptions processed and generated in 2020 as compared to 2019, and >38% increment of E-prescriptions in 2021 as compared to 2020. Dr. Raymond raised an important question before he ended his talk which is on how can we normalize digital health adoption during the endemic phase.

The second panelist was Prof. Sok Ching Cheong, who presented on “MeMoSA – Mobile Mouth Screening Anywhere”. Prof. Cheong briefly shared the Cancer Research Malaysia’s work in digital health which specifically addresses the issue of oral cancer and oral potentially malignant disorders. “In the National Oral Health Plan 2021 – 2030, the aim really is to increase the Stage 1 diagnosis or double the Stage 1 diagnosis from 15% to 30%. Unfortunately, we are not there yet. And one of the approaches that have been proposed by the Ministry of Health is to use digital health in order to penetrate and increase reach to the population that is most hard to reach. And overall, Malaysia has the vision of having equitable healthcare and this could be achieved in part, through digital health”. A teleconsultation tool called MeMoSA was established, to power access to early detection of oral cancer for everyone, everywhere. Prof. Cheong also mentioned that they wanted to change the paradigm in creating accessibility to service (changing face-to-face meeting versus a specialist in your pocket), and to improve on conventional systems.

The final speaker of the day was Dr. Tzu-Hsien Yang, with his topic of a presentation entitled “Constructing Biomedical Databases to help Disease Biomarker Identification”. Dr. Yang first shared with the audience why we need biomedical databases and what are these biomedical databases. He later presented in detail his recent work on Kawasaki disease, which is a disease that primarily affects children and is the leading cause of acquired heart diseases in children. His team worked to construct the Kawasaki Disease Marker Database (KDMarkers) – a biomarker database for investigating epigenetic methylation and gene expression levels in Kawasaki disease, which helps doctors and biologists to understand more about the disease. The constructed database allows users to search for potential KD markers and the affected patient groups, as well as visualization of raw data sets.

The webinar was recorded and made available to the public on the NCKU Overseas Hub in Malaysia’s Facebook page: https://fb.watch/ggxrAD2zre/. Among the webinar, participants were university representatives from Malaysia (Universiti Malaya, Heriot-Watt University Malaysia, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia), Taiwan (National Cheng Kung University), Indonesia (Universitas Airlangga), and Philippines (Batangas State University, University of the Philippines). In addition, there were also participants from Naz Medical Supplies and Cancer Research Malaysia.