“ The number one step to take is a change in mindset to realise that private and public hospitals aren’ t separate entities but belong to the same ecosystem, and hence they should work in sync,” said Dr Kamal, adding that over the past 10 years Malaysia has actually made strides in this regard, with patients who are on waiting lists in public facilities allowed to receive subsidised care at private hospitals for certain procedures, like bypass surgeries or for diagnostic imaging such as MRI scans.
The Hospital Services Outsourcing Programme( HSOP) was launched by the Ministry of Health( MOH) in July 2024 to provide funds for patients from MOH hospitals to check in at private facilities for cardiothoracic, cardiology, radiology, and nephrology services.
“ Since July 18, a total of RM144 million( US $ 32 million) has been allocated for this initiative, and preliminary findings show a 75 percent reduction in patient waiting times for arteriovenous fistula surgeries from 16 weeks to four weeks, MRI and ultrasound procedures from 20 weeks to 16 weeks, and CT scans from 14 weeks to 12 weeks,” Malaysia’ s health minister Dzulkefly Ahmad told parliament last December, according to Free Malaysia Today.“ Therefore, we hope to continue to increase this public-private collaboration to enable more citizens to access fast and effective health services for the treatment they need.”
Dr Kamal believes this collaboration should be accelerated beyond these few services to allow people to visit any public or private hospital without worrying if they can afford them. With greater patient volumes, he argues, private hospitals will also be able to bring costs down, thus making their services more affordable for a greater number of Malaysians.
In the Ministry of Health’ s 2023 Health white paper for Malaysia, the government had already highlighted that“ effective public-private partnership will help to balance resource utilisation across the public, private and non-profit sectors,” thus improving access to healthcare services.
The white paper identifies the implementation of sharable electronic medical records( EMR) as one initiative that should facilitate collaboration between the public and private sectors. Dr Kamal agrees EMR are key and says that IHH, the company that owns Gleneagles Hospital Johor and several other healthcare providers in the country, is moving towards data integration while connecting with the rest of the healthcare system.
“ Outpatient information is already shared between hospitals in IHH through EMR, and we are planning to do the same with inpatient records in the future,” he said. This makes communication between community hospitals in rural areas, both private and public, and more specialised hospitals like Gleneagles Johor easier, especially when it comes to patient referral.
Gleneagles Medini
This sharing process is further improved by Gleneagles Johor specialists regularly visiting community hospitals for education, screening, and treatment or offering consultation through telemedicine.“ For example, if a patient comes in at a community hospital for an imaging scan that requires the advice of a subspecialist expert on heart, breast, or prostate images, but those subspecialists aren’ t available in that area, community hospital radiologists can send the images to our subspecialists across the country and receive their advice in a few minutes or hours,” explained Dr Kamal.
Such integration is not only beneficial for communities who can receive specialist advice closer to where they live, but it also helps identify those patients who really require checking in at more specialised hospitals, thus reducing strain on them and improving resource use and allocation.
Once this interconnected system is in place, technology can more easily deliver on the huge promises of making care more efficient. At Gleneagles Hospital Johor, for instance, they are working to deploy AI systems to help radiologists prioritise the most urgent cases by processing thousands of imaging scans at once, while previously doctors had to look at one image at a time on a first come, first served basis, meaning that patient images requiring urgent attention previously might have been analysed later than those of minor cases.
GlobalHealthAsiaPacific. com ISSUE 1 | 2025
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