Dr Badrulhisham Bahadzor

The short version

I’m a practising urologist based in Kuala Lumpur. I also write code — have done since 1994, years before medical school. URO APPS PLT is what happens when those two worlds finally merge properly.

Early days with computers

I got my hands on Borland Delphi Pascal and Microsoft Visual Basic in 1994, and that was it. Around the same time Slackware 1.0 came out, and I was compiling Linux kernels to squeeze everything out of whatever hardware and limited RAM I had. For fun, I ran a two-port dial-up Bulletin Board System — the kind of thing that predated the modern internet.

The tinkering never stopped. It just ran in parallel with everything else.

Medical training

I graduated with an MB BCh BAO from Trinity College, University of Dublin, Ireland in 1997. After that I came back to Malaysia and entered the Master of Surgery programme at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), training at Hospital UKM in Cheras, Kuala Lumpur. Qualified as a General Surgeon in 2004.

Then came urology. It felt like the best fit — a sub-specialty that combined hands-on surgical work with real clinical application of knowledge, and one where technology keeps pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

I was admitted to the Malaysian Board of Urology and received my FRCS (Urology) from Glasgow, both in 2008. From 2009 to 2011 I completed a fellowship in robotic surgery, learning robotic-assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy under Dr Peter Sutherland at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in Australia.

Health informatics and HL7

Somewhere along the way, UKM Medical Centre made me their webmaster. When the centre embarked on a multi-million ringgit project to custom-build THIS (Total Hospital Information Software), I was appointed deputy project manager, lead for software integration, and integration standards and security specialist. I oversaw the integration of THIS with existing legacy systems and wrote the hospital’s first HL7 specification back in 2007.

I was also active in the pro-tem HL7 Malaysia committee, and was invited to the HL7 Working Group Meeting in San Diego in January 2007 under the US Trade and Development Agency — the one time I got a US A-2 diplomat visa.

Live surgery telecasting

I have a long-standing interest in video streaming and conferencing. In 2007 I single-handedly designed and engineered a solution to live-telecast surgery from two operating theatres at UKM Medical Centre in Cheras to the Park Royal Hotel conference room, using two ISDN 64×2 lines with AV conferencing equipment.

This was for the 2nd Asia-Pacific Obesity Conclave (APOC), held 5–7 April 2007 in Kuala Lumpur, jointly organised by the Asia-Pacific Bariatric Surgery Society, the Malaysian Association for the Study of Obesity, and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

Consultant life

I returned to UKM Medical Centre in 2011 as a full-fledged Consultant Urologist and Senior Lecturer. I taught medical students, supervised Master of Surgery candidates during their urological attachments, and guided urological trainees through their specialist training.

In 2015 I moved to private practice at Sunway Medical Centre in Bandar Sunway. Then in 2024 I moved to Hospital PICASO in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, where I continue to practise today as a Consultant Urologist — active in robotic-assisted surgery, laparoscopic surgery, and advanced BPH procedures such as HoLEP. The move also gave me the breathing room to establish URO APPS PLT properly.

The tech never stopped

Through all of this, the Linux terminal stayed open. Over the years the tools changed — home automation, virtualisation with Proxmox, LXC containers, Docker, Kubernetes — but the instinct to build things myself never went away.

Then AI happened, and it gave me a second opportunity to get properly involved in software design and production. I learned what RAG is all about, understood the limitations of LLMs — hallucination in particular — and came to believe that retrieval-augmented generation is one of the best ways to ground the source of information and put a harness on how models derive their answers.

Why URO APPS PLT exists

Being a domain expert in urology — and to a certain extent, medicine broadly — means I understand the day-to-day work: the clinical workflows, the patient behaviours and needs, the facility requirements. All of it is ever-changing. Some requirements are small but can make a real difference in efficiency.

I’ve built automations and new interfaces over existing hospital information systems to bridge the gaps. Many HIS platforms lack any form of intelligent notifications — something that agentic AI now makes possible to layer on top of existing systems. The best part is, you don’t need to be a traditional programmer to do this. Understanding the use case and requirements, combined with some technical knowledge and the right tools, is enough to design and produce genuinely useful software.

That is why URO APPS PLT was born.

Qualifications

• MB BCh BAO — Trinity College Dublin, 1997
• Master of Surgery, General — UKM, 2004
• Malaysian Board of Urology, 2008
• FRCS (Urology) — Glasgow, 2008

MMC No. 40441 · NSR No. 130482