On the primary care front, the Ministry of Health came up with an initiative for a web-based portal called Patient Risk Profile Portal (PRPP) to help General Practitioners (GPs) digitise the pre-visit declaration process for patients visiting GP clinics. Besides eliminating manual processes such as documentation of patients’ declarations and submission of their clinic visits, PRPP facilitates the clinic’s assessment for COVID-19 risk, and triage of patients for segregation of high-risk versus low-risk patients. Patients’ risk levels (red, amber, green) are automatically assigned based on their conditions, travel history, contact history and clinic visit history.

MOH tasked IHiS to develop the GP portal quickly and a cross-functional team was assembled. Within two weeks, PRPP was deployed in April to 11 GP clinics and by mid-April, more than 500 Primary Care Network clinics had begun the process of onboarding.

Lee Kah Moon, Assistant Director, Product Management and Delivery Group, IHiS, and the senior Project Manager for PRPP, said:

“Being part of this project made me realise how tough the GPs’ work was – they had to take care of not only the usual diagnoses and treatment, but also their own, their staff and their patients’ safety, as well as the additional administrative work and reporting due to the pandemic. It motivated my team to make things as easy as we could for them to help in their fight against the virus.”

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Due to the rapidly evolving situation, PRPP became a key enabler of MOH’s plans in late May to ramp up COVID-19 testing in the primary care sector to support the lifting of circuit breaker measures. Functionality was rapidly added to capture the Acute Respiratory Infection (ARI) indicators reporting and to automate swab referrals. The product design focused on the most immediate priorities, with improvements slated in further weekly update releases. As more GPs used the system, they gave feedback to improve the PRPP, which was also incorporated into the schedule of weekly updates. Coupled with the nationally used COVID-19 Test Repository (CTR), the ARI reporting function gives the authorities complete coverage of ARI cases diagnosed in the population. A new update on 20 June also allowed GPs to view the swab results of the patients they sent for swabs from the PRPP, which draws the results from the CTR.

Other iterations include notification reminders to suspected COVID-19 patients to go for their swab tests, incorporating a multi-language self-declaration form for patients, and changing the questionnaire whenever necessary to align it closer to a new-case definition, which is periodically updated as scientists learn more about the symptoms of the virus.

Wilky Wijaya, Senior Manager, Competency Centre- Development Centre, IHiS, said that the pressing need and short time frame to develop the project motivated everyone to work closely together to fast track its development.

“It was a holistic team effort that saw everyone contribute with their respective skill-sets. We had to quickly build and enhance PRPP and ARI, and then integrate it with CTR, NEHR and the Enterprise Service Bus. Everybody gave their best, even on weekends. We all wanted to do our part to fight COVID-19 and help GPs.”

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The automation provided through PRPP enabled MOH to facilitate the eventual lifting of the circuit breaker measures. As of 20 June, about 600 clinics are using PRPP and when the current FormSG ARI submission is decommissioned in a few weeks, 1,000+ GP clinics would have adopted PRPP for ARI reporting.