The pandemic has certainly put a focus on healthcare and health-related products and services.
But there is still a way to go to increase the adoption of health tech in Malaysia which may slow the trajectory towards digitalisation in the space, particularly in areas such as telemedicine and teleconsultation, which are considered as an efficient way for doctors to reach out to their patients.
“Health tech is getting more awareness everywhere due to Covid-19 but every country has different adoption rates to new health tech innovations. Malaysia has the same offerings as other countries but other countries have a higher adoption rate to the technology because of the urgent gaps that it fills there.
“For example, Malaysia has 12 doctors per 10,000 population which is six times more than Indonesia at two per 10,000 population. So in Malaysia, our access to traditional healthcare is still widely available.
“That is why, we, as health tech providers, need to find other gaps in our market that we can fill in immediately, ” says Vita founder Dr Ian Ng.Vita is a health app which provides visual insights to your health data and is integrated with laboratory information systems to provide a historical health record and early warning to future risk of chronic disease using artificial intelligence.
While there are already a number of other health-based apps in the market, Ng says Vita is the only one with a full digital health record and mental health monitoring tools.
The app aims to help users modify their lifestyles as a form of disease prevention.
Ng notes that one of the biggest challenges in persuading consumers to adopt health tech is in getting them to be open about their health.
“Healthcare is traditionally a very personal and private issue. You can find in some households where a parent does not even talk about their own health issues and challenges with their spouse or children.
“We hope that by providing everyone with a digital tool available on their own mobile phones, it can increase awareness and understanding of a person’s health and enable them to start the conversation on how to improve their health collectively through lifestyle modifications, ” he says.
With people’s thoughts now trained on health, Ng says the startup has intensified its messaging to consumers and continues to find ways to use technology to help improve people’s health while studying how health data can fit into a smart city model.
Vita is a participant of Cyberview’s accelerator programme, which Ng says has helped the startup to focus its development work on features which are more urgent for corporates, such as measuring the stress levels and employee psychology.
“Thus, we are able to address the gap in the industry which is important for businesses. This has subsequently given us an avenue into understanding what affects the everyday lives of people at work, ” he says.
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Quelle/Source: The Star, 25.07.2020
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