Held across two days at Penang Waterfront Convention Centre and organised by Tech Dome Penang under the Penang2030 initiative, AI Horizon 2026 gave a warm welcome to Viva Shaik Farid, Director & General Manager of United Crest Healthcare (UCH) & UCrest Malaysia. She was honoured to be invited to speak at the AI Conference, themed “Bridging the AI Divide Across Functions and Nations.”
In her session, Viva traced UCH’s journey from pandemic-era response to a working framework for sustainable digital health, built on a few key events and takeaways:
- The COVID-19 Resilience Medal, awarded to UCH by Singapore’s Ministry of Health in December 2023 for its telemedicine support of pregnant COVID-19 patients under the Home Recovery Programme
- Three pillars of a sustainable digital health system: Clinical (outcomes first), Economic (financeable at scale) and Technological (AI-ready)
- How tools built under pandemic pressure, from AI voice triage to iMedic Optics fundus screening, became permanent infrastructure rather than temporary fixes
The medal traces back to early 2020, when Singapore’s digital health adoption compressed years of change into months. iMedic kept elderly and pregnant patients monitored at home through telemedicine and connected IoMT devices, work later recognised directly at the Ministry of Health level.
That same instinct carried into UCH’s AI tools. When Home Recovery Programme enrolment outpaced what human callers could manage, iMedic placed an AI voice system on the first call, running the same structured clinical screening for every patient, with higher-risk cases escalated to a clinician in real time.
iMedic Optics followed the same logic in a different setting: a handheld retinal camera paired with an AI reading engine, screening for diabetic retinopathy, AMD (age-related macular degeneration) and glaucoma in minutes, with every result verified by a clinician. In both cases, the AI flags and clinicians decide; Viva was clear that this partnership between a system and a clinician’s judgement is deliberate, not a gap still to be closed.
Her message to AI Horizon was that resilience under crisis and rigour built through accreditation aren’t separate stages. Done well, the first builds the foundation for the second.
As UCH continues to enhance iMedic’s platform, its path forward centres on vulnerable-first design and interoperable data that reward prevention over emergency response. The aim, in Singapore and Malaysia alike, is to turn pandemic-era innovation into the kind of digital health infrastructure patients and clinicians can depend on long after the crisis that first built it has passed.
