Prescribing AI for better healthcare

Lim: Healthcare is a market-driven industry, and we aim to build solutions based on client feedback.

AS a medical doctor, Kev Lim’s time at hospitals had been largely spent on the other side of the waiting room.

However, when he began bringing his 10-month-old daughter for regular follow-up appointments due to a medical condition, the inefficiencies and inconvenience of waiting lines at healthcare facilities became glaringly clear.

Waiting periods would take up the better part of a day.

Throughout this time, patients were given little information about when the doctor would see them. Lim recalls the added difficulty of finding time to bottle-feed his daughter due to the inflexibility of the queue system.

“It was during that time that I started to see healthcare from the perspective of a patient rather than a provider,” says the CEO and co-founder of Qmed Asia.

“It is a very common scenario which often results in significant frustration,” he says. “I began to realise this was a pain point in healthcare and saw an opportunity here.”

The experience led him and co-founders Tai Tzyy Jiun and Nic Tai to innovate a solution that would reduce and ease wait times at clinics and hospitals.

In 2019, they founded Qmed Asia (originally named QueueMed). The digital solution enabled healthcare providers to have a staggered appointment time module and allowed patients to track their live queue journey and estimated waiting time from their phones.

According to Lim, uptake for the solution was slow in its early days. “Doctors tend to be quite reluctant to try new things or take risks, as we get very comfortable with what we already know works,” he notes.

However, the arrival of the pandemic marked a turning point. Due to social distancing needs, the business was asked by the Health Ministry to implement its online appointment system in government health clinics (klinik kesihatan).

During the Covid period, the startup grew to support 400 health clinics and further assisted in providing the queue management system for over 40 vaccination centres.

“This was when the company really scaled up, as many more doctors became familiar with our solutions,” he shares.

Today, Qmed Asia is partnered with over 400 healthcare facilities, including those under Columbia Asia, KPJ, Pantai, as well as clinic groups such as Qualitas Medical, Klinik Anda and Klinik Ajwa.

Lim opines that this growth was possible because the company has always maintained its focus on the healthcare industry.

“We know healthcare inside out, and put a great deal of effort into customising our system to those specific needs,” he says.

“Healthcare is a market-driven industry, and so we concentrate on listening to clients’ pain points and requests, building our solutions from there.”

Seeking to further streamline patient flow at healthcare facilities, the business developed and introduced its automated self-registration kiosks, which aid in reducing bottlenecks at the front desk and easing staff workload.

Beyond patient journey solutions, Qmed Asia’s services now extend to helping hospitals and clinics with medical device integration. These offerings include remote monitoring of patients at home through connected medical IoT (Internet of Things) devices, and automated data transfer between radiology devices for enhanced efficiency.

The company also aims to be at the forefront of incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) tools into the healthcare field, with solutions such as an AI-powered search engine trained on the Malaysian Clinical Practice Guidelines, and AI-generated summaries of medical histories and notes with diagnostic suggestions.

“We also recently worked with the ministry to co-develop DR. MATA, which uses AI software connected to fundus cameras to quickly and accurately detect diabetic retinopathy,” Lim adds.

He also highlights Qmed Asia’s AI Medical Scribe, an automated voice-to-text note taking tool that helps reduce the time-consuming burden of administrative paperwork for healthcare practitioners.

“It’s very easy to deploy and adds a lot of value,” he says. “Because of this, we are confident that 2025 will see strong adoption of our Medical Scribe.”

To Lim, the company’s expanding range of products reflect what he sees as a natural progression of tech advancement in the healthcare industry.

“From manual processes, hospitals and clinics may move to digitalisation with systems like EMR (electronic medical records). The next step then is the smart integration of devices, and once this ecosystem is in place, AI becomes the next logical piece of the puzzle.”

The company runs on a B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) subscription-based model for its software and hardware. All its solutions are developed in-house based on client feedback, which Lim says allows for greater control and ability to adapt to local contexts.

“We believe healthcare is a very localised business,” he explains. “The Malaysian healthcare system and demands are completely different from other countries’, therefore our solutions are designed to cater to local needs.”

For instance, the AI Medical Scribe’s transcription capability is trained to accommodate Malaysian speakers, who not only vary in languages but often switch between multiple languages within the same sentence.

Looking ahead, Qmed Asia has set its sights on regional expansion. However, Lim points out that the company will need to be carefully thorough in the localisation training process for each market before entering them.

“Having mainly focused on Malaysia, we are able to handle the complex range of data that comes with many languages and cultures, and a varied healthcare system. We believe this will give us a unique advantage,” he says.