Author’s Blurb: I don’t suffer from any lifelong ailments that would require me to be always on guard with my health, but I definitely know a handful of people who do. When bad times strike and they’re forced to be rushed to an emergency room or to make an urgent trip to the nearest clinic, it’s a hassle starting from scratch and filling up form after form to gauge the state of their health.
If it’s not filling up tons of forms, it’s sitting down with the nearest available nurse and explaining your condition from A-Z once again.
Although ideal, not everyone has the luxury of going to the same hospital or clinic every time—which can make data collection an extremely time-consuming and stressful process.
This is where REMEDi comes in.
REMEDi is a cloud based system that offers both patients and their respective healthcare professionals a completely paperless way of storing medical data.
A Better Way To Keep Everyone In The Loop
The REMEDi team was established all the way back in 2012, with emphasis on solving 3 main problems.
- Allowing more patients to access their own data accessibly.
- Letting more healthcare personnel get a holistic view of patients through an easy to understand Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system regardless of where the patient gets their treatment.
- Allowing healthcare funders such as employers, insurance agencies, etc. to get a more transparent breakdown of healthcare costs.
We spoke to Dr. Khairul Faizi Khalid, who founded the platform and currently acts as its medical advisor.
“We want to position ourselves as an important enabler to bridge the challenges in bridging private and public healthcare sectors,” he explained.
Their EMR can be used to view patients’ blood pressure, pulse rates, sugar levels, medication allergies, and more—all of which are also made available to patients when they log in with their access.
And don’t worry, all of this is secured with military-grade AES 256-bit encryption.
“No other parties can access medical records except the patients themselves and the attending physicians only,” continued Dr Khairul.
Cost-Effective Tracking Is The Way To Go
For just a flat rate of RM50/month, hospitals, clinics and general practitioners are able to use REMEDi’s Clinic Management System (CMS).
When asked how they manage to keep their platform’s access so affordable, Dr. Khairul told us that there are a few ways this is done.
“We built the platform from the ground up, without paying any third-party licensing fees. This alone will be cost-effective for our end users to adopt and implement.”
He also explained how this could save workplace employers on precious cost.
This is through their REMEDi Occupational Safety and Health Systems (OSH) that allows employers to access (compliant with data protection rules, of course) the aggregated health and wellness data of their employees.
Such data includes the overall BMI of employees, how many man-days lost, and other parameters that would help organisations understand their employees better.
“This will eventually save a lot of money by reallocating resources from the cost of treatment of employees who are patients towards preventing employees from becoming one,” Dr Khairul continued.
This ‘prevention is better than cure’ approach has also been adopted by another player, Naluri, which takes into account the mental, physical and emotional state of employees to be monitored by their respective corporate organisations.
Note that the OSH system and REMEDi’s other systems such as the patient-doctor experience are separate products—so employers aren’t able to see sensitive, private information on the latter.
“The REMEDi OSH is a system built to manage medical operations onboard oil rigs currently but it also applicable and flexible to be used in other industries that rely heavily on the compliance of OSH for their workers,” said Dr. Khairul.
“Employers will be able to monitor Occupational Safety and Health incidents that occur on their offshore platforms but they will not be able to access any individual patient’s data.”
Seeing Through The Promise Of Systemised Healthcare
What they’re is doing is also in line with initiatives that the Malaysian government have been planning to roll out in mid-2020—one of which is the decision to implement an EMR structure to systemise the collection of patient data via 5G technology.
Although REMEDi isn’t an organisation directly part of the effort, Dr. Khairul told us that their focus remains to be on practitioners in the private sector.
“We are currently rolling our REMEDi CMS solutions in the private sector, to be more specific, to general practitioner clinics.”
“Since the EMR was built to make sure the data flows together with the patients, we are hopeful that one day REMEDi’s platform will be given a chance to be rolled out nationwide together with MOH,” he added.
At the moment of writing, their platforms are being used to empower outreach programs in Stampin, Ijok, Bukit Cherakah and Semporna.
According to Dr. Khairul, this is also the first time such a program has been used to track such analytics.
Recently, with the COVID-19 pandemic, REMEDi has also introduced a brief self-assessment form to help Malaysians evaluate themselves.
“We see and we know there’s a huge bottleneck at our government healthcare facilities, so having a self-assessment is to help the patient triage themselves, but most importantly, to build awareness amongst the public,” commented Ikmal, their co-founder.
REMEDi also told us that if things go their way, soon enough, we’ll be able to see their systems being implemented across more government clinics.
Bottom Line: Aggregating data in a centralised system might sound daunting to those who prefer their private medical records to stay on pen and paper, but I do foresee this implementation as inevitable. There are more than a dozen industries out there who rely on data to streamline their work, and at least this is a system that also puts a responsibility on its users to track and keep an eye out on aspects of their health at all times.
- You can read more about other Malaysian startups we’ve written about here.
Featured Image Credit: REMEDi
