Who am I

Published in 2011
Updated: February 2020
(Photo in 2012)

I am Dr. M. H. B. Ariyaratne.

I am a medical doctor who is currently working on health informatics.

I have developed open-source health applications that is used by hundreds of users round the clock automating mission-critical health care delivery workflows in more than 40 healthcare institutions of Sri Lanka.

I was born on the 14th September 1975 in Galle, Sri Lanka. I completed my education up to the G. C. E. (O/L) at Mahinda College, Galle, Sri Lanka. I attended to Royal College, Colombo 7, Sri Lanka for my G. C. E. (A/L). I was selected to the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ruhuna, Karapitiya from my first attempt from the advance level examination in 1994.

I was from the 18th batch of the Faculty of Medicine. I completed my 2nd MBBS in 1998 with a 2nd Lower Class. I completed my 3rd MBBS in 2000 with a 1st class with distinctions in Microbiology, Community Medicine and Pathology. I completed my Final MBBS in 2002 with a 2nd lower class. I was ranked the 10th from the all island list initially and later ranked the 12th after inclusion of graduates from the Jaffna faculty.

When I was a schoolboy at Royal College, we had two periods of Computer Studies for a week. I started my programming carrier with gw-BASIC in 1993.

In 1994, soon after my A/L Exam, my father bought me a 386 desktop computer from Tec Sri Lanka. There was no hard disk. The RAM was 1MB. I started my programming with gwBASIC, dBase, PASCAL and then Q-BASIC.

My medical faculty life started in later 1996. During the faculty life, my father bought me the second computer, a Pentium III 650MHx machine. I achieved some milestones as I did a nice presentation driven colours night in 2000 at the faculty. The multimedia presentations with graphics and animations were relatively rare at that time and everyone was very impressed. I was invited to make a similar multimedia presentation for the Colours Night of Richmond College, Galle in 2001. I did several works for the faculty using MS-Office, Photoshop and Illustrator. Everyone in the medical faculty recognized me a computer guy. Even the head of IT of the faculty intermittently sought my help in technical matters which he could not manage himself.

I was working as a Demonstrator at the Department of Surgery, Faculty of Medicine in 2002/2003. I helped the Head of Surgery to conduct few research activities by creating and testing data entry forms, making MS-Access database and data analysis using EpiInfo.

I married Niluka Gunasekara in 2002. At my wedding, I projected presentations with songs and visuals. Live proceedings of the wedding also projected in between. The family and friends have not witnessed a similar multimedia experience at that time. I still enjoy those memories.

I did my internship at Teaching Hospital Karapitiya. I did medicine with Dr. Wasantha Kodikaraarachchi from 2nd March 2002 for 6 months. The next six months, I was doing my internship as a Surgical HO in the Professorial Surgical Unit. My consultants were Dr. M M A J Kumara and Dr. J P M Kumarasinghe. During my internship, I hardly could touch the computer due to a very busy schedule.

After completing my internship, I worked as an RHO (Surgery). I was transferred to Base Hospital, Kamburupitiya for my first post-intern appointment alone with my wife. We were first on call Obstetrics & Gynaecology Medical Officers for 5 years there. During that time I started my part-time private practice as a general practitioner. I had time and money to spend on IT during my stay at Kamburupitiya. I started developing medical software. My first software was an Electronic Medical Record system for myself. Some friends of mine, like Dr Jagath Samarasekara, was interested and started to use it. Several other friends of mine, namely Dr Veditha Banduwardhana, Dr Gayaman Dissanayake and Dr Chrishantha Widisinghe helped me to add new features to the EMR system. Later I started developing other medical software like laboratory management system, medical channeling management system, pharmacy management system and inpatient management system.

I had several requests to develop non medical software as well. As there was a great demand for the software, I employed five employees, who are very talented in their fields. Mr. Sudesh Pathirana was the chief programmer. Mr. Thilina was handling the marketing. Mr. Janaka Sampath and Chamath Prasanna were the hardware guys. Mr. Rangana was handling the accounting and also helped the development with his accounting knowledge. Miss. Nalika Sewwandhi was the receptionist and did the data entry and program testing.

By 2010, my software was running in more than 20  healthcare institutions in the Southern Province of Sri Lanka. I was losing lot of money from software business because of the company overhead expenses. Most of the money I spend from my private practice had to be spent to cover up the expenses of the software projects.

From the annual transfer list of 2009, I was transferred back to the Teaching Hospital, Galle. I was working as a Medical Officer in Radiology.

I was selected to follow an MSc (Biomedical Informatics) programme conducted by the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. In 2012, I completed the MSc and started working as a Medical Officer(Health Information) at the Department of Health Services, Southern Province, Sri Lanka from 2012 to 2015. During that time, my contribution to achieve national productivity awards, national quality awards and ISO 9001:2008 were appreciated by the Provincial Director and the rest of the staff of the Provincial Department. I also developed several systems that are still been used in Medical Administration Workflows.

In 2012, I converted my Hospital Information Management System to an Open Source System with an MIT license. It was hosted in Github. Several young boys who passed out from the ATI(Labuduwa) and College of Technology contributed to the Open Source Project. By 2019, it was running in more than 40 healthcare institutions.

In 2015, I was appointed as the DMO (or officially Medical Officer in Charge) of the Divisional Hospital, Unawatuna. Under my leadership, I could achieve the runner's up for the Best Divisional Hospital in Southern Province in a competition called "Dakshina Suwa Viruwo 2016". It accesses the service care delivery in addition to quality, productivity and patient safety.

I was then selected to MD(Health Informatics) in 2019. I completed MD in 2019. I was attached to the Management, Development and Planning Unit of the Ministry of Health as a Senior Registrar in Health Informatics. Until then I was not given any role in the government sector to develop software despite several requests. Luckily, Dr Anil Samaranayaka, the Director of Health Information, identified my capabilities. Despite some severe resistances, he convinced the Ministry to allow me to design a system for Healthy Lifestyle Clinics of Sri Lanka. With the help of several of my colleagues, I was able to develop a system that is now been used in several HLC clinics in Sri Lanka. I am currently working on improving the software so that Dr Anil Samaranayaka will not have to regrate his decision to support me when so many were against that idea.

Currently, I am attached to the University of Southampton as a Commonwealth Digital Health Fellow.