The Expansion of CCF@Expo
As the need for capacity grew, CCF@Expo was expanded from 6 to 10 halls with a total capacity of close to 8,000 beds. Leveraging the collective experiences deployed at CCF@Expo, the multi-disciplinary teams supported the setup of additional facilities in a matter of days. At the same time, pre-CCFs were being set up at several public healthcare institutions (PHIs) to cater to patients awaiting transfer to CCFs.
The Situation
A critical consideration to the successful containment at the CCFs was to deploy an integrated solution that allows us to anchor an IT baseline and continuously refine to scale it to the needs of the operations. Aptly termed “lift, drop and evolve”, the approach leveraged IHiS’ in-house design, build capabilities and the strong partnership we have cultivated with the clinicians. More than 50 enhancements were made in the first 50 days of use to meet CCF needs while continuously adapting them to the evolving workflows and requirements of users.
To properly facilitate the transfer of patients from the PHIs to the CCFs, clinicians are required to submit to MOH their requests of eligible patients they would like to decant to the CCFs on a daily basis. At its peak, MOH received some 900 requests on average each day. The information submitted manually by the individual PHIs on excel spreadsheets are then collated and merged by MOH who will allocate the limited capacity to the PHIs.
In addition to human errors, there was no standardisation of the data provided by various entities, such as NRIC/FIN numbers, date formats in the submissions. As a result, it was tedious to consolidate the daily requests before they can generate the finalised list of decanted patients for the PHIs to make necessary transfer arrangements the following day.
The Solution: CCF On-Boarding Portal
The solution was to create a portal that serves as a single source of truth for on-boarding patients. Working with MOH and the PHIs, Donovan Wee, IHiS’ Director, Channels, Product Management and Delivery Group 3, set up the CCF On-Boarding Portal on Microsoft 365 within two hours. The next day, the portal started its pilot testing and was developed into a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in less than seven days, providing all parties with a common view of the on-boarding list.
To standardise the information required, he also devised a Pre-Entry Template with format checkers to help PHIs collate the necessary information for upload to the portal. As a result, MOH was able to cut down the time required to collate all the requests and generate the decant list in three minutes instead of two hours.
The approved list automatically looped back to the requesting PHI, giving them more time to prepare for the transfer of approved decant patients the next day. MOH was also able to merge the decant list with their in-house Dormitory System, ensuring accurate bed assignment for each patient (see GPConnect article).
Feedback from users helped to refine and evolve the solution. For example, several suggestions to include more columns/information were quickly ‘voted’ on and executed. To properly facilitate the transfer of patients from the PHIs to the CCFs, clinicians are required to submit to MOH their requests of eligible patients they would like to decant to the CCFs on a daily basis.
“The process of building and deploying the portal was agile and collaborative. Everybody has a common purpose to make sure that we act quickly to provide the best care for our all our COVID-19 patients. It was fulfilling to be able to quickly translate their requirements into a working system.” - Donovan Wee, Director, Channels, Product Management and Delivery Group 3, IHiS
