PneumaScan installed in Hospital Kuala Lumpur

20 February 2012

Cambridge company PneumaCare Limited has installed its innovative PneumaScan respiratory assessment device in Hospital Kuala Lumpur (HKL), the largest hospital under the Ministry of Health in Malaysia.

Dr Ward Hills, PneumaCare’s CEO, and Dr Simon Baker the Product Director, delivered the device to Datuk Dr Jeyaindran Sinnadurai, Head of the Department of General Medicine at HKL, where it will be used to benefit a diverse range of patients.

"We were impressed with the ease with which the PneumaScan was installed and how straightforward it is to use after a comprehensive two-day training course," comments Dr Jeyaindran. "Nearly 10% of our admissions — that is 11,000 patients a year — are solely related to respiratory disease. Many of those could be helped by this device.

"We also intend to use it to further our research into patient care. Two of my general practitioners, Dr Paras Doshi and Dr Zulfa Siti, have been assigned to collect data using PneumaScan on patients within the Cardiac Rehabilitation Ward (CRW). The aim of our studies is to research whether the PneumaCare instrument can infer clinically relevant information before conducting invasive assessments."

On the final day of the PneumaScan training programme, the Chief Secretary to the Government of Malaysia, Tan Sri Mohd Sidek bin Haji Hassan, was visiting HKL. He was introduced to the PneumaCare team and actively took part in a demonstration of the device.

"Operating in Malaysia gives us the opportunity to explore the instrument’s performance on a wide range of ethnicities and in different environments," says Ward Hills. "For example, we hope to learn how comparable are results of lung capacities between ethnic groups to standard expected results. We are anticipating significant new data in the areas of cardio-thoracic, respiratory medicine and general pulmonary function testing.

"Specifically we are aiming for clinical collaborations and datasets looking at diseases such as COPD and tuberculosis, the latter being almost impossible to obtain in Western Europe. This will enable us to continue to improve and develop the effectiveness and applicability of our software and hardware."

The company says that discussions are taking place with other healthcare institutions in Malaysia, including the Malaysia Institute of Respiratory Medicine in Kuala Lumpur, on patient care and research collaborations, as well as multi-centre trials and research projects and international placements with PneumaCare users in the UK.