It was incredibly challenging for medical frontliner Dr Chan Hai Feng and his team when COVID-19 first arrived in our country. Workload piled up due to the increasing number of people who have been infected with the coronavirus. At one point, they were screening up to 100,000 patients a day. However, regardless of their hectic schedule, Dr Chan and his peers also took upon themselves to organise funds for the needy, donating PPEs, and resources to people in need, while advocating avidly for the well-being of fellow frontliners.
During mass screenings, Dr Chan realised that the entire process was far too time-consuming. On top of this, it also poses a huge risk by further exposing his staff and the public unnecessarily to the dangers of contracting the COVID-19 virus. In 2021, when the Malaysian government started easing restrictions, Dr Chan identified an urgent need to make COVID-19 screening safer, easier and more effective. With the support of his team, he injected a capital of RM 500,000 to develop CLEA, Malaysia’s first virtual COVID-19 screening platform.
After three months of beta testing, CLEA launched in October 2021, becoming an incredible success and instantly gaining profound public traction. In just six weeks of the app’s launch, CLEA had acquired more than 20,000 downloads, made 100,000 impressions and verified over 18,000 virtual COVID-19 screenings.
The CLEA platform allows users to verify and authenticate their self-test by medically-qualified doctors and provides a convenient and seamless virtual solution to COVID-19. More than that, users are guided in conducting self-tests by in-app step-by-step instructions, resulting in more accurate results. With the invention of CLEA, Dr Chan and his team are working towards empowering people to lead their lives safely and responsibly whilst ensuring they are safe from COVID-19.
Natural Health was fortunate to have the opportunity to speak to Dr Chan Hai Feng, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CLEA, about this revolutionary platform. In this interview, Dr Chan shares his experience and story about making CLEA a success.
What inspired you to develop virtual screening?
The team behind CLEA were actively involved in mass screening activities over the course of the pandemic. During then, there was a time when the whole team was down because we were in contact with positive patients. Everyone was unmotivated. However, I was convinced that there must be a better way of screening more effectively while lowering the risk of exposure to everyone. After creating the app, we had replaced almost all our physical onsite screening with this method. This method has helped us save time, lower the risk of exposure, and make the COVID-19 screening more efficient.
What are the benefits of virtual screening in our efforts to combat Covid-19?
COVID-19 started in December 2019. There are no medications for the virus. The only measure to stop the spread is to develop vaccines, which is not a silver bullet since the virus has already spread widely. Screenings play a significant role in preventing the spread of COVID-19, where we can quickly isolate and quarantine positively tested patients.
However, physical screening is a huge waste of human resources and time. On top of that, it comes at a high cost and a greater risk of exposure of COVID-19 to all parties involved. We believe that with the correct structure and framework, we can have a virtual screening platform that allows for higher efficiency and capacity while maintaining the integrity of COVID-19 screening. With this, we can screen on a larger scale and prevent the further spread of COVID-19.
What were the challenges in the process of developing the app? How did you overcome them?
Challenges were mainly on the technical part. We had plenty of ideas on how to verify and perform the screening. However, not everything is feasible or practical to incorporate into the app. We are lucky to have colleagues with exceptional tech backgrounds working on app development. They try to design and code at their best effort.
Can you tell us more about the app, such as its features, technology, etc.?
There are four main verification processes for the whole screening – ID verification, test kits verification, sample collection verification and results verification. The entire screening process is designed according to guidelines and protocols that the doctors usually practice in clinics. Furthermore, all the transmitted data in CLEA are encrypted to ensure its security. We have multiple auto-scaling server clusters to cater for the app, databases and back offices. From time to time, we also perform penetration tests and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to ensure all of our servers are secured from every endpoint.
How does CLEA shape the future of Malaysia’s digital landscape?
More and more clinics will soon adapt to digital healthcare as everyone will realise that this lies ahead in the future. We foresee CLEA complementing the private and the government medical facilities in many ways, sensitising healthcare, and at the same time improving the overall community healthcare index.
What are your plans moving forward?
Besides our plan to actively reach out to the public and increase their engagement with our services, we are also in the midst of expanding and looking to offer this service to more neighbouring countries. Thus, we hope to assist them in combating COVID-19 with a scalable screening platform.
By: Dr. Chan Hai Feng
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CLEA
