GATEWAY CONSULTING SINGAPORE

Dr K C Lun is a pioneer of medical informatics in Asia. Since presenting his first scientific paper at MEDINFO 86 in Washington DC, his accomplishments in the field include hosting the financially successful World Congress of Health and Medical Informatics, MEDINFO 89 in Singapore in 1989, chairing the Editorial Committee for MEDINFO 92 in Geneva, founding the Asia Pacific Association for Medical Informatics (APAMI) in 1994 and assuming the IMIA Presidency in 2001 (the second Asian to helm the international organization)

Dr Lun graduated from the University of Singapore in 1971 with B.Sc. (Hons). He received his PhD in biometrical genetics from the University of Birmingham, UK in 1975 under an 1851 Royal Exhibition Overseas Science Research Scholarship and a MSc in medical demography from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, University of London in 1981 under a Colombo Plan Scholarship.

He was an academic staff of the NUS Faculty of Medicine for over 26 years and held positions as Director of the Medical Informatics Research Program (1996-2001) and Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Health Informatics (1990-2001). In 2001, he left NUS to join Nanyang Technological University to help start its School of Biological Sciences, serving as its founding Vice-Dean (Academic) and later, NTU Dean of Admissions in 2005.

A student of Emeritus Professor Michael Healy and Professor John Osborn of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Dr Lun has taught biomedical statistics for nearly 40 years and is one of the most sought after teachers for biomedical and clinical statistics in Asia. While at NUS, he had provided consultancy services to many clinicians and research scientists on projects and clinical trials. He also helped the late Senior Professor S.S. Ratnam set up the Biostatistics Unit for the W.H.O. Collaborating Centre for Human Reproduction at NUS. In addition, he had served as statistical consultant and given workshops and courses in many Asian countries, including North Korea, for international agencies such as IDRC, WHO and UNDP.

Internationally, Dr Lun served as President of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) from 2001-4 and Founding President of the Asia Pacific Association for Medical Informatics (APAMI) from 1994-7. He has made numerous contributions to the work of WHO, IMIA, IDRC, UNDP and several other international agencies as temporary advisor/consultant, mainly in the area of biostatistics and health informatics. In 1997, under a research contract from the World Health Organization, he helped the organization develop a software called WINSSIZE for their field manual “Determination of Sample Size in Health Studies”. Running on MS Windows, the app was downloaded by over 600 individuals from universities and research institutions worldwide, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Dr Lun was also the creator of the ‘Cyberspace Hospital’, the first virtual hospital on the World Wide Web, which was launched in May 1995 and accessed by over 120 countries worldwide. The virtual hospital was later replaced by ‘Health ONE’, a multilingual, multimedia health information resource funded by the National Computer Board of Singapore for implementation on the nationwide Singapore ONE network. For its pioneering work in the development of a multilingual, multimedia health portal on the Internet, ‘Health ONE’ won first prize in the scientific poster competition of INET ’98, an international conference on the Internet held in Geneva, Switzerland in 1998 and organized by the Internet Society. In May 2000, he successfully launched the first Telemedicine consultation system in Singapore called TeleGems, linking the A&E Dept of Alexandra Hospital with 2 nursing homes for the elderly, Lentor Residence and the Moral Welfare Home.

For his achievements and efforts in promoting Singapore through his international activities in medical informatics, Dr Lun won the Singapore Internationale award presented by the Singapore International Foundation (SIF) in March 2001. On 2 August 2002, was one of the 5 recipients, selected from among 51 nominees, of the prestigious “Excellence for Singapore Award”. The “Excellence for Singapore Award” was to “recognize and honour individuals, groups of individuals, or organizations that bring credit to Singapore by being among the best in their areas of activity in Asia or in the World” (award citation).

Dr Lun set up Gateway Consulting in October 2006 to keep himself active in retirement. Gateway Consulting currently runs the highly successful Gateway to Health Informatics Course, the international version of the AMIA-OHSU 10×10 Certificate Course in Health Informatics. He also held a concurrent academic appointment of Professorial Fellow (Health Informatics) in the Dept. of Information Systems, NUS School of Computing from 2010 till his retirement from NUS on 31 December 2014.

Passionate about staying ahead of the curve, Dr Lun now focuses on the use of his repertoire of skill sets in biostatistics, health informatics, epidemiology, research methods and medical demography to position himself in healthcare analytics. To this end, he taught healthcare analytics courses to NUS computer science undergraduates and the NUS Centre for Health Informatics Executive Training.

In recent times, Dr Lun has leveraged on his multiple skill sets in biostatistics, epidemiology, medical demography and biomedical informatics to focus on healthcare analytics. For the Data Analytics in Healthcare Course, KC brings with him a wealth of experience in training participants the tools and techniques of data analysis in healthcare.

On 22 August 2017, Dr Lun was conferred the IMIA François Grémy Award of Excellence by the International Medical Informatics Association. The award is the highest international recognition for health informatics, a discipline that deals with the use of info-communications technology in healthcare, including the use of electronic medical records, hospital information systems and telemedicine. The IMIA François Grémy Award of Excellence was established by the International Medical Informatics Association in 2004 to honour “an individual whose personal commitment and dedication to medical informatics has made a lasting contribution to medicine and healthcare through her or his achievements in research, education, development or application in the field of medical informatics”. Dr Lun was invited to receive the award at the award ceremony at the World Congress of Health and Medical Informatics (MEDINFO) in Hangzhou. He was the first Asian to receive the award since it was first presented in 2004. It was also significant that 2017 marked the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the International Medical Informatics Association.

For more details on Dr KC Lun, please visit this URL: www.gatewaypl.com/lun