Today, together with my colleagues from the eHealth Unit, I visited the Medical Information Section of the Department of Health, located in Putrajaya (an administrative district where the central government administrative agencies are all located). The University of Malaya, which is the oldest national university (…in fact, older than the birth of the country), has always had a strong relationship with the central government. It seems that the interaction is particularly active with this section lately. We had a meeting from 9:00 to 13:00 with the intention of finding specific seeds of collaboration and promoting them.

As a person who leads the clinical registry activities within the Unit, I was surprised to learn that there are a lot more types of medical information accumulated and organized there than I had expected. I was also impressed by the efforts being made to ensure compatibility between different data specifications. However, I also learned that there are still lots of rooms for improvement in terms of complete coverage and validity, since there are several types of “national” hospitals: university hospitals under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, public hospitals under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health, etc., and private hospital groups are managed in entirely different ways.

We left the Ministry of Health with the agreement that we would collaborate on the educational aspect first, since there were many concrete things that we could collaborate right away, including their participation in some of our newly established “Master of Digital Health” course. The lovely nasi lemak that was served for lunch was tasty and not too spicy.

今日は、eHealth Unitの同僚たちと一緒に、Putrajaya（中央政府の行政機関が固めて存在している行政区）にあるDepartment of Healthの医療情報部門を訪問しました。最も歴史がある国立大学（…というか、国の誕生より実は歴史が古い）でもあるマラヤ大は、もともと中央官庁との関係も強いのですが、特にこのセクションとは人材の交流も活発みたいで、具体的な協業の芽を見つけて進めましょう、という意図で9時から13時まで会議をしました。

Unit内で臨床レジストリ事業をけん引する人間としては、思ったよりも国に集積する医療情報がたくさんあり、かつ整理されているのに驚きました。異なるデータ仕様の互換性に関する取り組みも盛んで印象的でした。ただ、「国立系」と一口に言っても、教育省が管轄する大学附属病院、健康省管轄の公立病院…など複数の種類があり、また、私立病院グループは全く異なる運営をされているため、悉皆性および妥当性に関しては、まだまだ改善の余地があることも分かりました。

課題の同定も含めて、UMとは協業できそうなことがたくさんあったので、まずは教育面を軸にコラボしようぜ、と取り決めて健康省を後にしました。昼飯に出てきた可愛らしいナシレマ、辛すぎに意外と美味かった。