KUALA LUMPUR, April 23 ― The Malaysian Health Data Warehouse (MyHDW) will not contain any personal information of patients, Health director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah has clarified.

The Star quoted him as saying that the data would only relate to health matters and would not have sensitive information such as the patient's name and address.

"The names are all blank (blanked out). It is only the health information that we want, such as the disease and treatment.

"That is why we call it a health data warehouse ― there is no individual information there. We are not interested in the individual or address," Dr Noor Hisham said.

He also explained that patient's medical records will remain in hospitals and would not be shared with any outside parties.

"Furthermore, this health data is not shared with insurance companies or third parties. Data sharing is regulated by the ministry's Health Information Centre ...some general health informatics, however, may be made public," Dr Noor Hisham added.

Earlier this week, the Ministry of Health (MoH) launched MyHDW, which aims to connect public and private hospitals as well as clinics in order to share a variety of information and knowledge including a patient’s medical records in a secured system.

According to MoH, MyHDW will synchronise patient data from public and private clinics and hospitals, including university hospitals and Armed Forces hospitals, as well as data from the National Registration Department (NRD), the Department of Statistics, and other “health-related agencies.”

MoH said that MyHDW will focus on “detailed data collection” for query and analysis purposes, and that this will eventually allow physicians or researchers to find out about things like the percentage of diabetic or cancer patients in the country.

The MyHDW system, currently at Phase One, has already collected data from 2.5 million inpatients from all government and public hospitals, military hospitals and daycare unit services.

Phase Two aims to collect 70 million outpatient medical record data from other healthcare facilities such as health and specialist clinics.

MyHDW was developed by MoH in collaboration with Mimos Bhd, a technology provider under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (Mosti).

The use of MyHDW has raised concerns as to whether there are privacy issues and who has access to confidential patient data.