INTERVIEW
Malaysian eyecare clinic elevates services with AI OasisEye Specialists deployed AI machines to remote areas where doctors are scarce.
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hree ophthalmologists from Malaysia set their vision to operate a clinic in January 2020, days after getting a licence from the government. Little did they know that, in just a few weeks, a new fatal virus would infect people globally and interrupt business and healthcare operations. Instead of closing up the shop, the doctors of OasisEye Specialists decided to focus on opening boutique eye centres in northern, southern, and central Malaysia to cater to emergency eye care needs. It currently has three operating centres: OasisEye Kuala Lumpur, which is the main clinic, in Nexus Bangsar South; OasisEye Johor Bahru in Beletime Danga Bay, Country Garden; and OasisEye Seremban at Seremban 2. Since it is a specialty clinic, OasisEye Specialists was able to invest in technology and partnerships specific to the improvement of its eye care services. One of the notable innovations is artificial intelligence (AI) which helps detect risks of patients’ retinal ailments. Here is Healthcare Asia’s interview with Dr. Khaw Hoon Hoon, one of the board directors and founders of Malaysianbased OasisEye Specialists, wherein she discussed their boutique centres and strategies. What are the goals and principles that guide you and your colleagues to give eye care services to your patients? I’ve been practising as a clinician since 2003. For the last 20 years, medical services have evolved. From big hospitals to private hospitals, and now, we have what we call the ambulatory care centre. What we are doing is a daycare centre, where patients come in, get their treatment, and get discharged immediately after a few hours. It’s very much a boutique centre. It is the trend now, in the medical field, if you look around Singapore, Hong Kong, and even worldwide. We are not into bigger hospitals now, where there are multi-disciplines addressing all kinds of ailments from head to toe. We have deconstructed the hospital setting into boutique centres. We at OasisEye Specialists have concentrated on ophthalmology—when the organisation is smaller, customer service becomes the priority. Our centre is patient-centred and comprehensive, where we get the chance to utilise our best technology and be able to provide personalised care to patients at an affordable cost. So how do we do that? It’s very easy: Get a group practice, where within the centre, for example, in Bangsar South, we have 10 practising ophthalmologists. The doctors here, we share all the same equipment and machinery. Therefore, we can afford to buy the best technology that we have. Patients get it at a fraction of the price for every cost for us to recoup back our return on investment. As a group, we offer multidisciplinary care. We have retinal 28
HEALTHCARE ASIA
Dr. Khaw Hoon Hoon, one of the founders of OasisEye Specialists (Photo from OasisEye Specialists website)
When the organisation is smaller, customer service becomes the priority
surgeons, glaucoma surgeons, and paediatric, oculoplastic, and refractive surgeons. When we are sub-specialising in various components of our eyes, we are able to serve our patients better. Patients have more quality care, instead of just a doctor or ophthalmologist treating the eye from front to the back so that’s the purpose of our group being subspecialised. What are the innovations, technology, and programmes that OasisEye Specialists are doing right now? We have artificial intelligence, which is replacing a lot of medical services that we have. For us, we also use this artificial intelligence grading software so that we can take a photograph of the patient’s eye and the artificial intelligence software will diagnose the severity of the disease. With this, a doctor does not need to be present. How important is all this? Where there is a large remote area where doctors and ophthalmologists are not accessible, all these machines will be dispersed to all these small remote centres. We can do retinal screening and take photographs of the eye, especially for diabetic patients, glaucoma patients, or age-related macular degeneration patients. These machines are deployed to those areas, then photographs are taken and the AI will ”grade” them, diagnose them, and identify those diseases to be referred to fellow doctors and ophthalmologists.
