Dr. Sitt Paing, one of Myanmar's most prominent voices in digital health, spoke to Tech Revolt exclusively about AI, governance, and what the region's healthtech revolution is really built on.

by Kasun Illankoon, Editor in Chief at Tech Revolt

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When most people think about the challenges of building a healthcare app, they think about bugs, bandwidth, and backend integrations. Dr. Sitt Paing thinks about trust.

A physician, digital health strategist, and one of Southeast Asia's sharpest thinkers on health technology, Dr. Sitt Paing led the development of HEAL, Myanmar's first hospital-led telehealth platform, out of Pun Hlaing Hospitals. His work sits at the intersection of clinical care, technology policy, and institutional design, and his perspective cuts through a lot of the noise that surrounds the healthtech industry today.

His central argument is as simple as it is provocative: the technology is rarely the hard part.

"In healthcare, people often assume the hard part is building the app, integrating systems, or making video consultations work," he explains. "Those are real challenges, but they are solvable. The harder question is whether patients and clinicians believe that care delivered digitally is still real care."

The Trust Problem Nobody Talks About

When HEAL launched, Dr. Sitt Paing found himself navigating two very different kinds of skepticism. Patients worried they were receiving a lesser standard of care. Clinicians worried about safety, workflow disruption, and medico-legal ambiguity, compounded by Myanmar's notoriously unreliable power and network infrastructure.

"The real work was not simply launching a platform," he says. "It was building legitimacy and redundancy around it. That meant anchoring telehealth in the hospital's clinical standards, making clear where virtual care was appropriate and where it was not, and ensuring that patients saw it as an extension of the hospital rather than a detached digital experiment."

The insight that follows is one he returns to often: "In emerging markets especially, digital health succeeds when it is trusted as part of care delivery or solution for difficult to access or on-demand need situations, not marketed as a substitute for healthcare itself."

It is a distinction that matters far beyond Myanmar.

When AI Plus Doctor Is Worse Than Either Alone

One of Dr. Sitt Paing's most counterintuitive observations concerns AI in clinical settings. Research has shown that AI can, in some diagnostic contexts, outperform humans working alongside it. Rather than being troubled by this, he sees it as a design problem waiting to be solved.

"There is a comforting assumption that combining AI with a doctor must automatically produce a better result than either acting alone," he says. "In reality, that only happens when the interaction is designed properly. If the workflow is poor, the clinician may over-trust the model, under-trust it, or be cognitively distracted by it. In that case, the combination can perform worse than the AI alone or the clinician alone."

The lesson, he argues, is about workflow design rather than model capability. "We should stop asking only, 'Is the model accurate?' and start asking, 'At what point in the decision process should this model appear? How should uncertainty be shown? When should it challenge the clinician, and when should it stay silent? What kind of explanation is actionable in a busy clinical setting?'"

He is direct about what this means in practice: "AI should not simply be inserted into existing workflows as a recommendation engine. It has to be integrated in a way that respects clinical cognition, accountability, and time pressure. The future is not doctor versus AI, or doctor plus AI in the abstract. It is carefully designed human-AI collaboration."

Why Governance Has to Come First

Dr. Sitt Paing is equally pointed on the question of regulation. For him, the instinct to scale first and govern later is not just misguided in healthcare. It is dangerous.

"Once health technology scales without governance, the cost of correction becomes much higher than the cost of preparation," he says. "In most sectors, you can afford to 'move fast and fix later.' In healthcare, poor governance does not just create inefficiency. It can produce patient harm, data misuse, bias, loss of trust, and policy backlash."

He advocates for regulatory sandboxes that allow innovation to be tested under supervision, with evidence standards and accountability frameworks built in from the start.

His framing of the issue is characteristically sharp: "Good governance should not be seen as anti-innovation. It is what makes innovation durable. In healthtech, governance is not the brake. It is the steering system."

Building a Strategy That Actually Travels

Pun Hlaing has partnered with major players including Prudential, and Dr. Sitt Paing has spent considerable time thinking about what makes cross-border healthtech strategies work, and what makes them fail. Southeast Asia, he points out, is not one market.

"The mistake many organisations make is assuming that what worked in one market can simply be copied into another. But Southeast Asia is too diverse for that. Payment rails differ. Data protection expectations differ. Digital infrastructure and cybersecurity maturity differ. Language and cultural context differ."

His solution is modular thinking. "What can travel across borders are principles, not identical implementations." Those principles, in his formulation, include starting with a real care delivery problem, designing for low-friction adoption, localising for language and workflow, building governance early, and proving value in measurable terms.

On public-private partnerships, he is similarly precise. "A successful partnership starts with aligned incentives around patient value, not just distribution." The failure mode is predictable: "Each party optimises for its own metric. The provider focuses on service volume, the insurer focuses on claims containment, and the technology partner focuses on engagement or adoption. If those incentives are not explicitly aligned, the patient experience fragments very quickly."

His verdict on partnerships that prioritise optics over operations: "In healthtech, partnerships fail when they are treated as branding exercises. They work when they are treated as operating models."

The Hidden Cost of Instability

Having worked in Myanmar through periods of significant political and institutional disruption, Dr. Sitt Paing has a grounded understanding of what instability actually does to digital health systems. His answer focuses on something less visible than damaged infrastructure.

"The most underestimated challenge is institutional fragility," he says. "Digital health depends on continuity: continuity of policy, continuity of institutions, continuity of trust, continuity of data stewardship. In unstable environments, those foundations are often disrupted."

He pushes back against the optimistic assumption that digital tools automatically create resilience. "Sometimes they do. But sometimes they simply digitize fragility. If governance is weak, if cybersecurity is poor, or if the workforce is exhausted, digitalisation can add another layer of vulnerability."

What Everyone Is Missing About the Next Five Years

Asked where Southeast Asian healthtech is headed, Dr. Sitt Paing redirects the conversation away from the apps and tools that dominate industry coverage.

"The shift I think people are underestimating is the move from digital health as a service layer to digital health as governance infrastructure," he says. "The more consequential shift will be the systems underneath: data governance, assurance mechanisms, auditability, model monitoring, identity, consent architecture, AI workable data platforms and interoperable evidence frameworks."

The competitive advantage in the next phase, he believes, will not belong to whoever builds the most impressive product. "It will be about which health systems build the trust infrastructure that allows digital tools to scale safely."

His conclusion carries the same conviction that runs through everything he says on the topic: "The winners will be those who understand that trust is not a communications issue. It is an institutional design issue."

If he is right, Southeast Asia has an opportunity to do more than adopt global healthtech trends. "It will become one of the most important places shaping what responsible digital health looks like globally."