Materia Medica Malaysiana

MyVista ready for market

THE information technology (IT) marketing arm of the Primary Care Doctors Organisation of Malaysia (PCDOM, www.pcdom.com.my) is ready to market its open source Primacare and MyVista healthcare management systems.

Speaking to In.Tech at ACM 2004, PCDOM’s president Dr Molly Cheah said: “We’re targeting MyVista at government hospitals and have already submitted our proposal to the Health Ministry.”

“Our goal is to establish a reference implementation of an open source mission-critical hospital management application in Malaysia and to develop a business case for investment in medical systems,” said E-Cology Corp president, Joseph Dal Molin.

Canada-based E-Cology is collaborating with the IT arm of PCDOM, GHC Medical Informatics Sdn Bhd, on MyVista development and marketing.

Dal Molin also is a director of WorldVistA (www.worldvista.org), a non-profit organisation committed to the development of the VistA integrated hospital management software currently used in 173 Veterans Affairs hospitals run by the US Government, as well as other hospitals worldwide.

With the help of paid staff and volunteers, GHC ported and customised the public-domain VistA to produce the open source MyVista application specifically for Malaysia.

“MyVista is the first nation-specific VistA in the world,” claimed Dal Molin.

Its web-based e-telehealth function lets individuals view their personal medical records online, as well as add self-measured blood pressure, blood sugar and other readings – all of which can also be accessed by their doctors.

“At the same time, doctors will have full access to all their patients’ multimedia medical records from anywhere. We are currently testing interoperability between patient information captured at the primary care level with detailed medical records maintained at the hospital level,” said Dal Molin.

“This is in line with the Malaysian Government’s aim to maintain lifetime medical records on all citizens and it also allows more efficient use of medical specialists in supporting primary care,” said Dr Cheah.

So far, GHC and E-Cology have been testing the interoperability of patient information between MyVista and the Primacare electronic medical records and clinical management system developed by PCDOM.

Primacare earned PCDOM the 2004 ICT Excellence award in the Open Source Software category at ACM 2004 (see In.Tech, Sept 7).