Retired professor Lun Kwok Chan is the first Asian and the first Singaporean to win the International Medical Informatics Association (Imia) Francois Gremy Award of Excellence .

He has received the very award he gave out 13 years ago - the first time the award was given out as the highest international honour for health informatics.

Health informatics is a discipline that deals with the use of info-communications technology in healthcare.

The Imia Award of Excellence was first given out in 2004. It was named after Prof Gremy after his death in 2014.

The 70-year-old started out as a medical statistician, teaching medical statistics and promoting the use of computers in medicine at the National University of Singapore.

He is the chief executive of Gateway Consulting, a firm that conducts courses on biostatistics, health informatics and data analytics in healthcare.

Imia is an independent association for health and biomedical informatics. It brings together constituent organisations and their members to discuss and improve healthcare worldwide.