Connecting Our Dots
Our story began in 2008, when staff from the IT departments of Singapore's healthcare clusters came together to form One IHiS. The aim was to use technology to achieve service excellence and value, transform care delivery and improve patient care.
We mapped a plan to drive greater synergies across the disparate and high performing systems through a strengthened and consolidated IT workforce that could power the Regional Health Systems towards their goals.
Today, consolidating public healthcare-IT has realised benefits such as aggregating demand for hardware, software and projects; sharing innovative solutions across clusters; specialised expertise and career paths for IT staff; and a critical mass of IT skills to meet future healthcare demands.
We continue to drive new standards in quality care and strive to remain at the forefront of innovation, transforming healthcare delivery across the country, for improved patient outcomes and cost-effective care.
2021 Year in Review
The year has been dominated by talk of vaccines and vaccination, with many publications listing them among 2021’s words of the year.
Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, public healthcare staff had another challenging year, having to deal with periodical surges of COVID-19 patients and the backlog of patients needing care. To augment the work of healthcare staff, many HealthTech solutions were rapidly developed and continually enhanced for efficiency. In this year end wrap, we take a look at some of these solutions that are both pandemic and non-pandemic related.
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2020 Year in Review
Major dictionary publishers have declared 2020’s word of the year as “pandemic” – indeed, the word has dominated every corner of the global landscape. While the pandemic put a temporary halt to many facets of Singapore’s economy, healthcare operations got even busier, as both frontline and back office staff geared up – literally and metaphorically – to provide care for patients, especially those with the virus.
HealthTech followed suit, as many developments sprung up to help in the fight against COVID-19. Some were entirely new, while others were a result of innovation – taking things that existed and putting them together in a new way. Read more in our 2020 Year in Review below!
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2019 Year in Review
Take a look at some of the tech solutions rolled out in public healthcare in 2019 that support our healthcare workers and enhance the patient experience!
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2018 A Look Back: 10 Years of Enabling Better Healthcare Through Technology
This year, we celebrate our 10th Anniversary. Since 2008, it has been an incredible journey of 10 years, powering Singapore's healthcare systems and transforming healthcare through technology. Read on and discover some of our milestones over the last 10 years.
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2017 Smart Health Solutions for a Smart Nation
We continue to push and turn ambitious concepts into reality, and search for technologies from industries worldwide to develop game-changing, state-of-the-art systems. Our teams have piloted several Smart Health projects like the Smart Health Video Consultation and the Smart Health TeleRehab. This allows patients and caregivers to access quality care from within their community and homes.
The new Multiple Readmissions Predictive Model was also launched to support the Hospital to Home Programme, benefitting over 9,000 patients who are at risk of multiple readmissions. We continue to support the technology solutions of five new healthcare facilities – Keat Hong Family Medicine Centre & Child Development Unit, Admiralty Medical Centre, Pioneer Polyclinic, Bedok Polyclinic and Punggol Polyclinic.
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2016 New Mission to Improve Population Health
Since 1 November 2016, we have merged with the Information Systems Division of MOH Holdings to form a single organisation. This is to better cope with the surging demands on healthcare and support the Ministry of Health in moving Singapore’s healthcare towards one public healthcare system, and raise the level of IT level deployment beyond our public healthcare institutions to public and preventive health, primary care and intermediate and long term care settings.
Other achievements in the year include Ng Teng Fong General Hospital being the first acute hospital in Singapore and ASEAN to attain Stage 7, the highest level of HIMSS EMRAM and the Institute of Mental Health being the first psychiatric hospital outside of North America to attain Stage 6.
In addition, we also piloted the Match-A-Nurse app at Singapore General Hospital and KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital so that nurses can care for patients within their community in their spare time. Our Prescription in Locker Box (PILBOX) allowed patients from SingHealth Polyclinics to collect their repeat medication at their own time and convenience, saving 24.7 minutes each visit. The Singapore Diabetic Retinopathy Programme (SiDRP) also garnered several local and regional awards for helping to reduce turnaround times for timelier intervention.
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2015 Migrating to the Cloud
More than 500 of us, from frontline staff to Group Directors and senior management, were involved in Singapore's first mega project of setting up H-Cloud and migrating existing systems and data at the public healthcare institutions. We migrated more than 200 systems over 15 months with 99.95% success rate and minimal impact to hospitals' operations and patient treatment.
Ng Teng Fong General Hospital and Jurong Community Hospital opened smoothly, and the acute hospital attained Stage 6 in less than 3 months of its opening, affirming our efforts in leveraging IT to increase productivity and enhance patient care.
We also IT-enabled and helped open 2 more hospitals – Yishun Community Hospital and Sengkang Health at Alexandra Hospital.
HealthHub, developed by IHiS with the Health Promotion Board and healthcare institutions was launched, in support of Singapore government's aim to build a Smart Nation by harnessing information technology to imp rove lives and build stronger communities.
2014 Innovating for Our Future
Our Outpatient Pharmacy Systems set new groundbreaking records with our innovative efforts that included integrating robotic armatures from the car manufacturing industry, and made a clean sweep of almost all local and regional awards. We launched key systems all across, including the Intermediate and Long Term Care (ILTC) Portal for step-down care, MyEyeGym mobile app for children with squints, and One Queue One Payment which generates one queue number and one bill for the patient's entire day's visit, to give them a hassle free experience.
We also set up and soft-launched the largest dedicated Healthcare-Cloud (H-Cloud) that provides a consolidated, cloud computing platform and achieve greater efficiency, resiliency and economies of scale for faster and more secure retrieval of patient records.
2013 Laying the Groundwork
Our IT blueprint and vision to go paper-less, film-less, chart-less and script-less for the upcoming Ng Teng Fong General Hospital and Jurong Community Hospital clinched yet another prestigious international IT architecture award. IHiS and Allscripts set up a lab to accelerate IT solutions for public healthcare institutions. We continued to develop and implement systems that streamline workflow, automate checks, enhance staff efficiency and improve patient safety and experience.
2012 Connecting the Care Continuum
We continued to connect the dots along the care continuum, and rolled out more award-winning systems that leverage tele-health and mobile technologies to extend care beyond the hospital walls to the community and homes. Our IT architecture team clinched a prestigious international award for our integrated care architecture blueprint that enables high interoperability with other healthcare providers' systems.
2011 Setting New Benchmarks
IHiS played a pivotal role in four public hospitals achieving HIMSS EMRAM Stage 6 award. Stage 6, on a scale of 0 to 7, indicates significant IT capabilities. This made them the first public hospitals in Asia Pacific to implement such advanced systems to benefit patients.
We developed and launched our very own mobile application – miHealthcare. First-of-its-kind, the app provides a quick guide to the various public hospitals, healthcare institutions and polyclinic and allows patients to view, postpone, cancel their appointments.
2010 A New Chapter
IHiS rolled out Computerised Physician Order Entry (CPOE), among others, as part of an integrated Electronic Medical Records system at public hospitals, to realise our goal of "One Patient, One Medical Record".
We also piloted several new systems, such as the Multi-Dose Medication Management System (MMM) and Tele-Geriatrics, as we looked towards extending care beyond the hospitals, to nursing homes and patients' homes.
2009 The Big Move
IHiS moved to its HQ at Serangoon North, with better facilities and an environment befitting an innovative tech company. We stepped up our game and rolled out the region's first Closed Loop Medication Management System (CLMM) at three public hospitals, along with other cutting-edge systems, such as the Antimicrobial Surveillance Control System and an analytics platform, eHINTS.
2008 The Beginning
600 staff from the IT departments of the healthcare clusters came together to seed the formation of IHiS in July 2008. Within the year, IHiS garnered local and regional awards for our efforts in innovating and transforming our healthcare institutions.
