Category Archives: Announcements

World Tuberculosis Day 2023

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German physician and microbiologist Dr. Robert Koch(b.1843 – d.1910) announced on the 24th March of 1882, that he had discovered the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, which opened the way towards diagnosing and curing this disease.

To commemorate this day in history, World Tuberculosis(TB) Day is observed as a Global Health Day of the World Health Organization(WHO) on 24 March, annually.

This World TB Day global event is to raise public awareness about the devastating health, social and economic consequences of tuberculosis, and to step up efforts to end the global tuberculosis epidemic.

The following DIY poster highlights this event.

To help step up efforts to end the global tuberculosis epidemic, a national health information system(NHIS) should be used to integrate TB data and ensure the data generated by the NHIS are reliable and complete and arrive rapidly enough to be used for a national tuberculosis program (NTP).

A good notification system is thus one of the key elements for the success of a national communicable disease prevention and control program, like the NTP.

The NTP as a national public health surveillance system receives TB notification that uses electronic medical record (EMR) / paper-based medical record data to provide situational awareness for TB-related events.

Although the public health surveillance system leverages the International Classification of Diseases(ICD) from abstracted information about medically coded TB inpatient medical records, ICD codes are not primarily used for public health surveillance purposes.

However, ICD codes provide one way to measure uptake in populations at increased risk of TB, and help provide public-use data files for public analysis, and the NTP to conduct their surveillance of TB through case findings lists to identify cases of reportable TB.

Special allocation for HKL for digitalisation of patient records

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Image credit: Health Minister Dr. Zaliha visiting HKL on March 17, 2023, BERNAMA 2023

The Health Ministry of Malaysia has announced that it will allocate funds to the Kuala Lumpur Hospital (HKL) to digitalize patients’ medical records.

Currently, HKL as one of the country’s largest and busiest hospitals manages patient records manually and deals with over 16,000 records daily.

The move to digitize these records is expected to help HKL manage patients and their medical records more efficiently.

Speaking to reporters after the launch of “Buku Coffee Table Covid-19” at HKL, on March 17, Health Minister Dr. Zaliha Mustafa, who previously served at HKL as a medical doctor, stated that digitalizing patients’ medical records would be a great help to the hospital, and the Ministry would provide a special allocation for this purpose. However, Dr. Zaliha did not provide any specifics about the allocation.

Earlier, HKL Director Datin Dr. Rohana Johan expressed her desire to see all medical records digitalized for better management of the hospital and patients. She noted that around 16,000 patients’ medical records move in and out of Wisma Kayu—a building near HKL’s maternity hospital, nicknamed “Wisma Kayu” for its wooden infrastructure where all these records are kept, on a daily basis.

Image credit: CodeBlue, Malaysia

Dr. Rohana hoped that at least half of the records would be digitized before her retirement.

Reasons I should continue blogging and updating mrpalsmy.com in 2018

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I’ve been enthusiastic for the past few years ever since I started on setting up this website with website pages, and which also contains a blog for posts, which is why I call this mrpalsmy.com website a website-blog.

Maintaining a website-blog practically forces you to develop routines and content plans. These routines can be mimicked in my dietary planning as I am senior citizen and need to be aware and control food intakes, workout regimens to keep a healthy body going, personal discipleship, and relationships with the spouse and kids as well as friends and realtives. A successful website-blog may not always mean more page views. Personal growth through the discipline of updating a website and blogging can be success in and of itself. My blog posts here at mrpalsmy.com had since created a routine for blogging and updating a personal-professional-life website from the beginning, for which I am grateful.

All that being said, I’ve been a sporadic blogger of mrpalsmy.com for the past two years, during 2016 and 2017. The reason I stopped blogging as well updating mrpalsmy.com was as I thought I had covered most needs and guidance on aspects of Health Information Management (HIM) development as well in matters relating to HIM and healthcare quality activities for a developing country like Malaysia. As we look ahead to 2018, I do have positive reasons that I really should consider blogging in 2018 as well updating mrpalsmy.com. And I am encouraged to continue to post to the mrpalsmy.com blog, as I think blogging forces me to think more about a subject. I am also encouraged to update mrpalsmy.com with more and new updated information to the website pages I have created. Since this is a personal website, I believe it adds credibility in my professional life. I think having a professional-looking website helps add credibility. When it comes to dining, we eat with our eyes first. A meal that looks appetising will psychologically taste better than one that doesn’t—even if it’s the same dish. The same goes with a personal website or blog. If you have an eye-catching site, you will be taken more seriously than if you don’t.

Another reason to continue to update and blog in mrpalsmy.com is my readers. There is no way I will ever meet all of my readers or visit every country my readers live in. But the number of people I “have met” through this site is incalculably greater than it would be if mypalsmy.com did not exist. Thus, if my website blog content is high-quality, I believe my readers are going to look forward to newly published content on my blog as well this website. But surely I am not going to give my regular readers what they want by publishing as often as I can, without sacrificing quality. I think posting at least once a week is going to be sufficient to establish a regular core of my readers, and these readers are typically the ones who will form the core of my brand community.

In terms of capturing the most traffic, more blog posts and regular updates to the website is going to be generally better; more  times the inbound linking and indexing opportunities. To use a fishing metaphor, it’s like casting more hooks into the water; the more you cast, the more fish you’ll catch. Of course, this assumes that all of my blog posts and website updates are equal in quality. If the number of posts I make is like the number of hooks in the water, then the quality of my content is like the tastiness of the bait I use on my hook.

To end this blog post, I know that getting the ball rolling is often the hardest part, because it means coming up with a topic or title for my next blog post.

But I have updated already the Events Page of mrpalsmy.com and also posted some featured news in the footer section of mrpalsmy.com, for a start.

Organising a World of HIM

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IHMIA Organising a World of HIMInternational leaders and renowned speakers from the Health Information Management (HIM) sector will present the most recent advances in HIM to HIM professionals from around the globe when they congregate to learn, to exchange experiences and to develop enduring friendships when the International Federation of Health Information Management (IFHIMA) holds its flagship event – its 18th international conference in Tokyo Japan, from October 12 to October 14, 2016.

In preparation for this congress, IFHIMA has produced an article by Ms Lorraine Fernandes as the regional IFHIMA director for the Americas, on the subject “IFHIMA – Organizing a World of HIM”. This article was first published in the April 2016 issue in the Journal of the American Health Information Management Association (JAHIMA). The article provides an overview about IFHIMA, its purpose, structure as well as benefits for its members, and information about the IFHIMA 2016 congress including content that explores Tokyo as a tourist destination.

Readers of this website-blog can follow this link (this link will open in a new tab of your current browser window) to get access to the article. I wish to express my gratitude to Ms Angelika Haendel, President of IFHIMA and DVMD board member of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany for kindly sharing with me as an IFHIMA member, this link.

I also like to congratulate Ms Lorraine Fernandes – who according to Ms Anegelika Haendel, who had first raised the idea to write this article, then organised and lead the group of authors which enabled it to be published in JAHIMA, and who also painstakingly secured AHIMA’s permission to share this article with the international HIM community.

Happy Reading!