While all national attention is focused on the Covid-19 pandemic, those with a variety of other ills are either being neglected or too afraid to go to hospitals or clinics for fear of secondary infections.

So when Aemulus Corporation Sdn Bhd CEO Ng Sang Beng received a call from a former employee, Tan Hong Piaw, looking to see how they could start an e-doctoring over-the-air platform, he did not think twice.

“Tan is a software engineer who’s very brilliant and he left us last year to start an online hiring platform. He came to me recently, troubled about the MCO (Movement Control Order). He wanted to see how we could arrange for e-doctoring but had no contact with doctors and asked for my help,” he says.

Ng says part of the impetus for the platform is that so many people are afraid of going to see the doctor when there is something wrong with them. His mother is a case in point: “She had a glaucoma for three years and refused to see a doctor. We could not stand it any more and finally called a doctor friend and asked him to speak to her. Within five minutes he had changed my mother’s mind and she agreed to go in for a consultation.”

And now, layered onto the regular fear of doctors, is the fear of secondary infections, keeping people with other illnesses away from clinics and hospitals.

Ng started calling his doctor friends to see who would like to come onboard. Initially, most were skeptical. Then the CEO of a medical centre in Prai got excited about the idea and wanted to get all his doctors on board. “When I forwarded his message to the skeptical doctors, suddenly they were interested.”

And over the weekend, the doctor who had expressed the most hesitation became their consultant, sending them contacts and information about what hospitals you can go to for what.

Ng got his 15-year-old son Ng Yenjoe involved in the project. Yenjoe worked with Tan on this project and very quickly, they came up with Seee Doctor (as in see e-doctor) website and over the weekend, the doctors started signing up to offer sessions.

“Last weekend, we started talking to the doctors and letting them go through our very simple, straightforward booking system. Then we put them into the video conferencing mode, as if they were actually working with the patients and just in that weekend, five doctors signed up. So there has been a response,” says Ng.

At the moment, these doctors include surgeons and psychiatrists. “It is any doctor that we talk to who is willing to give the two free sessions. Right now we are focusing a lot more on the social obligation aspect rather than making money. We want to talk to doctors who are willing to come up and give services to patients. From there, they could actually get more patients in the future.”

For the next six months, all doctors who sign up to provide advice over-the-air, in other words, through video conferencing, can do so for free, provided they are willing to provide two free sessions per week. The free sessions are part of its LOVE Y’ALL 3000 programme.

“There are 20 free medical advice sessions available starting next week, which shall be matched with 20 more sessions, through donations by good Samaritans,” says Ng.

Ng points out that this will take up some of the vacant bandwidth at the hospitals in Penang (where this initiative is based, at least, to begin with). “I read some time ago that hospitals in Penang account for 70% of the medical tourism market in Malaysia. The customers are mostly Indonesian and now, business has dropped by 50%.”

So the platform provides two things — for patients, it provides much needed face time with doctors and for doctors, it helps fill up their vacant slots. If during the video conference, the doctor decides that this patient needs to come in for tests and a physical consultation, they book the appointment accordingly.

To book a session, go to https://seeedoctor.com, select the relevant doctor and pick an available slot for an on-air appointment.