In an evolutionary move, the IHiS team took steps to deliver a solution that has the capacity to meet the increasing patient load and the facility operation of VSM. Realising that the existing commercial off-the-shelf system that was used at the PHIs was not suited to meet the operational demands of the CCFs, the IHiS team embarked on building an in-house solution – a purpose-built integrated system that provides real time interaction and data feed, termed Health Discovery.

“To cater to the rapidly evolving requirements, we adopted a product mindset – minimise time to value, solve for a need and excel at change. This enabled our lean team of five members to get the initial VSM Kiosk off the ground within a week and later deliver a dashboard within 1.5 weeks that helped the clinicians on the ground in the face of a daily surge of patients. Since the dashboard went live on 1 May 2020, the team has completed 15 feature enhancements in seven weeks. I am thankful to have journeyed together with them when the country needed us most as this is what being in IHiS is all about. I am hopeful that my team members and I will be able to propagate this philosophy and tools to future projects.” - Torres Oey, Deputy Director, Emerging Services, IHiS

“It was a privilege working with the team of professionals, but we would not have been able to deliver at the speed without the support of Management in removing roadblocks. For example, members of the Management team were always present at the Command Centre and provided the necessary clearance and approval for us to proceed so we can focus on delivering the features and did not have to be distracted by administrative details.” -  Nitin Maheswari, Deputy Director, National Architecture Office, Solution Architecture, IHiS

Empowering patients with Health Discovery

With the deployment of Health Discovery, the manual work was taken off our healthcare professionals, allowing them to focus on urgent tasks. For example, a nurse spends an average of three minutes to take the readings of three vital signs of one patient three times a day. To take care of 2,000 patients would thus require 30 nurses working 12-hour shifts to accomplish this. As patients are empowered to take and submit their own vital signs, Health Discovery provided a dashboard that allowed them to track patients’ compliance and flag patients who may need more medical attention. Not only does it significantly reduce the workload on our nurses, the system also alerts healthcare professional on any interventions required based on the input.

To-date, Health Discovery has generated more than 1.3 million Vital Sign submissions since it went live, from more than 24,000 patient records through the GPConnect integration. As of May 2020, the Health Discovery dashboard has served 1.4 million requests with average Application Response time of 45 milliseconds, while monthly requests from the kiosks averaged 1.2 million, with Application Response time of 80 milliseconds.

With the translation help of Tseng Fan Shuen (Intern at the Ministry of Health Office for Healthcare Transformation), the Health Discovery VSM information supports five languages (English, Mandarin, Bahasa Melayu, Tamil and Bengali) to cater to patients of different ethnicities. Health Discovery will be deployed in all upcoming CCFs.

“One of our key considerations was how we can help the medical team document the entire patient journey. We worked with the medical team to document the journey and proactively adapted the entire process. By electronically integrating GPConnect and Health Discovery, to the introduction of GPCLite, we strive to make it more efficient for our healthcare providers to do their work.” - Phyllis Yap, Director, Product Management & Delivery Group 1, Primary Care & Care Integration and Lead for the CCF GPConnect Team, IHiS