TOWARDS MEDICAL DATA SHARING IN MALAYSIA

Abstract

Patients’ medical records are very important for practitioners to make medical related decisions. It consists of individual’s medical history, admission records, prescribed medicine, lab tests results, and etc. With the help from the advancement of Information Technology (IT), medical records are now being processed and stored using medical information system. All medical data are processed electronically and stored using policy-based storage management system. In Malaysia, we have clinics and hospitals that have already implemented Healthcare Information System (HIS) to perform above mentioned tasks. Unfortunately, there is no single standard or proper implementation in Malaysia. Different clinics or hospitals might use difference types of data standards, methods, algorithms or procedures to process their patients’ medical data. When this occurs, medical record sharing in the healthcare industry will become a daunting task. In this paper, we will discuss some issues about medical data sharing in Malaysia, its impact towards medical data sharing, and the basic steps to be taken to facilitate the medical data sharing amongst healthcare providers in Malaysia.