Thalassemia is an inherited blood disorder that requires lifelong disease management and therefore poses a pecuniary challenge in public health management in Malaysia. Constant monitoring of patients throughout their life requires novel adaptation of new technologies to enhance the effectiveness and success of the complex disease treatment regimen. In this paper we present a prototype mobile health (mHealth) application that will assist patients, care workers and medical practitioners in administering thalassemia disease management. The ubiquity and proximity of smartphones as a personal device will allow it to take up an assistive role in the management process. The user requirement analysis revealed that not all of the disease's information is available for stakeholders are suitable for the application and the alert function that works both ways between the patient and doctor is desirable. Operational limitations such as patient confidentiality, minor (underage) patients and analogous legacy registry has to be taken into account. The development of this prototype is the first for thalassemia and the finding of this study will assist future developers embarking on designing blood related disease management applications which share a similar process flow and data requirements.

The care process of patients suffering from thalassemia involves continuous and complex care procedures, which produce a large volume of diverse data. This makes the management of the patient records using paper-based system cumbersome. Information technology (IT) is an essential factor in the administration of healthcare where it can improves health care quality and service. Besides that, it provides more accurate and timely information regarding patient care. Consequently, the adoption of IT tools such as Electronic Medical Records (EMR) in hospitals is a solution to reduce some barriers in the healthcare services. This solution may improve the effectiveness of chronic disease management such as thalassemia, since a lot of the patient’s data will be stored and retrieved due to the frequent monitoring and treatment. In order to facilitate successful adoption of an EMR, involvement of end-users would be essentially required during the designing, implementation and usage phase. In this study, an EMR specifically design for thalassemia patient management is proposed to be implemented in Hospital Sultanah Aminah, Johor, Malaysia. The user requirement analysis (URA) of the proposed system, Online Thalassemia Management System (OTMS), is investigated and discussed in this article.