Thiam Zi Wei: Advancing healthcare delivery with cloud

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Zi Wei regularly indulges in her love for physically demanding activities, and her passion for being in the thick of action spills over to her calling for writing software scripts and enhancing applications in healthcare.

Zi Wei’s favourite weekend activity is aerial yoga. Besides, enhancing flexibility and strengthening muscles, she feels it allows her to meditate and achieve better focus – qualities that she feels are important for her job.

After graduating from the Universiti Utara Malaysia with a degree in Decision Science, Zi Wei found her calling in IHiS as a Senior Systems Engineer in the Healthcare Cloud (H-Cloud) Automation Team. A job that she has enjoyed for the past two years as she is always involved in different aspects of national projects.

“I was fascinated with information technology and decided that would be my path in life when I was still an undergraduate,” said Zi Wei on her career choice. In particular, she is passionate about how technology can enhance the healthcare sector.

Teching up

H-Cloud hosts multiple applications that retrieve and access patient records used by public healthcare institutions such as hospitals, speciality centres, polyclinics and nursing homes. Zi Wei and her colleagues are responsible for ensuring 99.95 per cent of Infrastructure availability by minimising unplanned downtimes and disruptions while H-Cloud is constantly being enhanced. H-Cloud infrastructure is built with high availability and redundancy to prevent unplanned downtime. For example, the team proactively review and conduct rigorous tests of the security measures and compliance of the applications to ensure secure uninterrupted technology services.

In addition to application support, scripts-writing and gathering of user requirements to enhance applications, the H-Cloud team employs advanced analytic tools with deep learning capabilities, including solutions to monitor the entire system to detect cybersecurity threats and protect data stored in H-Cloud.

More user-friendly features and automation are also being implemented in H-Cloud. Explained Zi Wei, “In the past, requests from users are submitted via Excel form. We have made this more user-friendly by digitising the form with Jira web application. Besides that, our team also introduced automations such as automated firewall rules review and automated enabling and disabling of Privileged Access Management Active Directory Identification (PAM ADID).

Zi Wei is appreciative of the experiences and learning opportunities that her job offers from learning new skills to pursuing a wide variety of interests that support professional growth. She recounted a proud moment – when she was assigned to conduct nine sessions with live demonstrations at the H-Cloud roadshow to help over 280 users appreciate how it worked and its benefits. Besides the personal growth as it was her first experience speaking in front of users, she felt that user-engagement allowed her and her colleagues to better design solutions that are validated by user experiences.

“I can say that it’s a great career choice for me! My work at IHiS is meaningful because it matches my interests and fulfils my desire to help others,” she said.

However, the job may also be challenging at times, with the responsibility that it entails. With mission critical applications hosted on H-Cloud that support the public healthcare institutions in 24 by 7 healthcare delivery, the team must strike a balance between good data security with maximum customisability and ease of configuration that the users require. Despite the challenges, Zi Wei feels that her H-Cloud team motivates her to be resilient and responsive to work closely together to achieve their common goal.

“As part of the project team, I am always mindful of the project timeline and make sure that the tasks assigned are completed on time. I feel blessed working with such experienced colleagues who are always willing to share their knowledge,” she said, adding that the confluence of ideas, thoughts, and opinions in her team provides the right environment to fulfil her passion for continuous learning and improvement.

The advice that she offers to tech talents keen on a career in the HealthTech sector: “it is one of the fastest growing industries and provides amazing career opportunities for you to make meaningful contribution and put your footprint in national projects. It is a steep learning curve, but you can achieve a rewarding career if you have the desire to learn and grow”.

IHiS has rebranded as Synapxe, the national HealthTech agency. Read more about our new identity here.