KUALA LUMPUR, March 26 — The Health Ministry is looking at rejuvenating Selayang Hospital as part of its efforts towards building the nation’s own Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system.

Its minister Datuk Seri Dzulkefly Ahmad said the ministry is relooking at how it could make Selayang Hospital a model hospital with an EMR system from the United States.

“Previously, there had been talk of creating a national EMR system, and it was said that the cost could amount to billions.

“The approach that we are taking now is to prove that ability (setting up an EMR), and that is through relooking at Selayang Hospital whereby it could be a model that could see the revival of its end-to-end EMR system — one we used to call the Rolls Royce of EMR that was supplied by Cerner from the US — that today has become an eyesore and almost non-functional.

“We want to revive the hospital and restore it to make it an EMR model at the hospital level,” Dzulkefly told Parliament during Question Time today.

In February 2023, former health minister Dr Zaliha Mustafa said that the digital system of Selayang Hospital was a problem inherited from previous administrations and was a “cancer” that needed to be fixed.

In March of the same year, she reportedly said in Parliament that the high cost made it a challenge for the Health Ministry to implement the EMR system in hospitals nationwide.

She reportedly said in a Bernama report that the implementation of the system required a high budget which might reach a billion ringgit as it would require upgrading the hospital’s infrastructure as well as taking into account the suitability of the building.

https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2024/03/26/health-ministry-to-rejuvenate-selayang-hospital-making-it-a-model-for-electronic-medical-record-system-says-dzulkefly/125601