Report on the E-Health Symposium

The College of Information Technology UNITEN is proudly present you with e-Health symposium. Scheduled on 26th June 2013, this symposium targets to bring together the varied community of researches on e-Health to show case their works, expertise and ideas.

This one day event was held at College of IT included keynote sessions by four distinguish keynote speakers from international and national healthcare organizations. The symposium feature a comprehensive tracks to e-Health topics that was interesting, with track sessions to help created a customized agenda based on your role, experience level and key focus.

E-Health is the transfer of health resources and health care by electronic means. It encompasses three main areas:

• Delivery of health information, health professionals and health consumers through the internet and telecommunications.
• Using the power of IT and e-commerce to improve public health services. Such as, through education and training of health workers.
• Usage of e-commerce and e-business practices in health systems management .

E-Health gave a lot of benefits to health related matter. But, Global Health faces 4 current challenges which is achieving universal coverage, sustainable health financing, efficiency in use of resources and effective mix of chronic diseases. The resolutions by the 58th World health Assembly is:

• Establishment of prepayment scheme.
• Risk sharing among population,
• Avoidance of Catastrophic Health Expenditure
• Adequate and equitable distribution of health resources 
• Plan for Universal Coverage

By means of Universal Coverage is securing access by all citizens to appropriate pro-motive, preventative, curative, and rehabilitation services at an affordable cost. There also got obstacle in Universal Coverage that is raised in health cost, emerging and re-emerging new diseases, increasing prevalence  of chronic diseases, lack of sustainable health financing system and inadequate information for decision making. But, the realities is that e-Health projects are costly. Many projects failed to be up scaled.

So, what is Free Open-Source Software? It stands for FOSS. As the name suggest, users have the rights to change and improve its design through the source code. It is fairly attractive because of it's low cost, flexible, vendor neutral and public domain.

Conclusion is that FOSS offer a potential solution to enhance ICT use in healthcare system. That was the official opening by Professor Dr. Syed Aljunid. 

End of Introduction

Moving on to the main point, which is a topic about MyHDW.

MyHDW which means is Malaysia Health Data Warehouse. It is a trusted source of comprehensive healthcare data structure for query and analysis.

Data Warehouse vs. Data centre

• Data centre is a facility house computer system and associated components.
• Data warehouse is a repository of an organisations electronically stored data or to facilitate reporting and analysis
• Data marts is a subset of an organisational data store or can defined as an oriented to a specific purpose to support business needs.

Health Information Data Warehouse: ISO definition:

• Grouping of data accessible by a single data management system.
• Possibly of diverse sources, pertaining to a health system or subsystem.
• Enabling secondary data analysis for questions relevant to understand the functioning of that health system.
• Supporting proper maintenance and improvement of that health system.

Standard Information for health

Malaysia Health Data Warehouse(MyHDW) goal is dissemination of truthful health information and evidence based decision making. Interoperability which means the ability of two or more system or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged. And it host computer for:

• EHRS
• Easy development and deployment of interfaces.
• Reduction of costs 

Appreciation 

In conclusion, ICT is a significant component to the health system.