Health Tech Company with a Soul.

Whoever said technology startups are the domain of the young only, did not foresee SANCY Berhad in the horizon, and its quick approach to dominate the regional healthcare landscape.

Founded with an obsession to help healthcare service providers and hospitals run better, its middle-aged founders come from digital enablement backgrounds in the financial services sector and experience in process transformation for government regulatory services.

Turning their experienced and weathered eye towards the healthcare industry, they are now obsessed about redefining the sector, using technology.

Within just 2 years, the feathers in their cap to date include being the first provider of ITBPO (IT business process outsourcing) services to the healthcare and hospitals sector in Asia, with 28 hospitals in their portfolio.

Following the acquisition and development of strategic intellectual property, SANCY is also appointed by the Vietnam Ministry of Health (MOH) to implement a cloud-based medical imaging system where medical images can be delivered in real-time as well as be accessible throughout the lifecycle of a patient’s treatment, no matter how many hospitals or clinics they go to for treatment.

SANCY’s Group CEO, Raj Ganesarajah, has spent over 25 years digitally enabling the ASEAN financial services sector and has played a major role in the propagation of internet banking in retail and corporate banking in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines and Singapore.

Enterprise IT News picked his brain to get a better understanding of SANCY’s DNA.

EITN: Why did you move from a highly lucrative position in financial services to health tech?

Raj: For me the turning point really was having to undergo a double heart bypass a couple of years back and spending almost 2 months in hospital. I had noticed that a number of hospital services, even the private hospital I was in, left a lot to be desired. These are problems that we had already solved in the financial and government services space, but hospitals still lacked the technology and the process transformation know-how to leverage tech in the delivery of healthcare services.

There are published reports that mention the average queue time for a patient to be served in a hospital on average is 90 minutes. This compared with an average waiting time in a bank of 15 minutes or less states that through the usage of technology, improvements are definitely possible.

The key here is really to leverage mobile-first, cloud and design thinking to optimise processes and deliver healthcare services more efficiently and affordably to the masses.

EITN: What does SANCY Berhad do?

We are an end-to-end next generation health tech technology and IT services company. We have made a number of strategic investments over the past 2 years to position us favourably in delivering the targeted services that we wanted to be known for.

Our first area of business focus is that we are the first and largest provider of ITBPO services to the healthcare and hospitals sector in Asia. We run an IT support centre in Malaysia that today serves 28 hospitals with their technology operations and 13 of these hospitals are in Malaysia. The rest are spread across the ASEAN and India region.

This ITBPO services operation enables hospitals to access the smartest people in health tech and utilise the latest in hospital information systems (HIS) and mobile healthcare technologies to not only make their operations more efficient but also deploy these systems at a significantly lower cost.

As a second area of focus, SANCY Berhad acquired the intellectual property for a next generation cloud-enabled, mobile-enabled Total Hospital Information Management System (THIS) that already has a track record of over 200 successful implementations across Asia.

We selected this system as it has a “lego block” approach towards deployment where it is made up of 28 modules which can be mixed and matched to best suit an individual hospital’s requirements.

 It is also HTML5-based which was a game changer because the system can be deployed to leverage mobile and tablets without any customisations. We feel that the future of healthcare is where the caregivers can access their systems anytime, anywhere and in real time.

To give life to this real-time aspect, we have also extended the THIS scope to cover medical imaging and lab testing systems, so this data can be delivered to doctors and patients instantly.

To test this concept, SANCY Berhad has already been appointed by the Health Ministry of Vietnam to implement a cloud-based medical imaging system where medical images can be delivered real time and also shared amongst various hospitals and clinics following the patient without the patient having to carry around thick medical folders.

The final pillar of our business is the healthcare digital media business where we have a collaboration with InfoMed to create InfoMed Online.

This is a social media platform for healthcare. The key to driving transformation in the healthcare space is the dissemination of knowledge and creating a sharing platform where healthcare practitioners can learn and share. InfoMed Online achieves this goal elegantly.

Our next step in this space will be the “Uberisation” of healthcare services making homecare and specialised healthcare services much more affordable.

EITN: Why do you consider your company as having a soul?

When we formed SANCY Berhad, we had 2 primary goals. One was to redefine healthcare systems functionality where we provide to hospital administrators, doctors, nurses and the rest of the caregiver fraternity, the ability to deliver GREAT services.

Some examples of this is through the usage of mobile and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in scheduling management; we intend to decrease the wait times for patients from 90 minutes to under 15 minutes. We also use smart scheduling techniques, so a patient can do his blood test, medical scan and see the doctor in one synchronised process versus having to endure 3 separate queues as is the case now.

Another way we have redefined functionality is through the adoption of HL7 and SNOMED CT standards as core design elements of our clinical note taking systems. We have dramatically shortened the time it takes for doctors and nurses to key in their clinical notes.

Due to this standardisation, clinical notes and discharge summaries also become much more usable digital data which is shareable and searchable. All of this makes Malaysia’s vision of having a nationwide electronic medical records (eMR) system much more feasible.

The other primary goal we have is to redefine the cost models involved with the adoption of technology. We believe that the traditional licensing model involved in the adoption of technology, to be rapidly becoming obsolete.

This is the main reason why we wanted to own the intellectual property and supplement it with a robust ITBPO skillset. This together with a focus on cloud-based deployment, we intend to provide the latest in healthcare systems to hospitals on a cost-effective monthly deployment fee.

Our experience shows us that though this approach we have been able to lower the technology investments required by at least 50% making it more affordable for more hospitals to leverage this next generation of technology.