Leveraging digital technologies for information technology-enabled healthcare transformation at SingHealth

Abstract

Singapore Health Services, or SingHealth in short, is Singapore’s largest public health organisation. SingHealth was established in the year 2000 with ‘the aim to deliver consistently high-quality care that is appropriate and accessible to patients’. Since its inception, SingHealth has introduced numerous digital innovations to strengthen its business model and healthcare delivery. These include investments in mobile applications such as HealthBuddy and MyCare, which are widely used by patients in Singapore to manage their medical appointments, order their medication and monitor their health, which can all be done remotely. With the Covid-19 pandemic, SingHealth introduced Swabot which helped carry out automated nasal swabs at Covid-19 testing sites; Doctor Covid, which is a chatbot hosted on Telegram, an online messaging application that helps to improve care for Covid-19 patients in community care settings; and an AI-based tool called the Community-Acquired Pneumonia and Covid-19 AI Predictive Engine, which can determine the severity of pneumonia in Covid-19 patients based on chest x-ray images. SingHealth’s investments in information systems and technologies have enabled SingHealth to improve its operations, provide better healthcare delivery to patients, better manage doctors’ and nurses’ workload, and address the various challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. This case examines how digital technologies revolutionised SingHealth’s workflows and processes, resulting in better quality healthcare for patients, and will be helpful for healthcare organisations looking to leverage on technology and health informatics for optimum healthcare delivery.