If 2020’s word of the year is “COVID-19”, surely an early contender for this year is “vaccination”.

In Dec 2020, COVID-19 vaccinations operations (VacOps) for Singapore started. By mid-Feb 2021, more than 250,000 people have received their first dose, with more than 60 vaccination sites/teams in operation. This includes all 20 polyclinics in Singapore, 22 PHPCs, 14 vaccination centres and 11 mobile vaccination teams. How does information technology (IT) help with the safe and efficient administration of vaccination? Let’s take a look at how healthcare organisations partnered IHiS on using technology to power the process.

Teching up Vaccination Centres to support Singapore’s COVID-19 Vaccination Operations (VacOps)

With COVID-19 vaccination operations (VacOps) being a national effort, multiple private healthcare providers were roped in to supplement public healthcare’s effort. IHiS worked with both public and private healthcare operators to tech up all of our polyclinics, multiple vaccination centres (VCs), public health preparedness clinics (PHPCs), and mobile vaccination teams (MVTs) who go to places like nursing homes and senior residential facilities.

The process of teching up a vaccination centre (VC) follows a 17 day cycle; the first four days are allocated for planning activities such as site recce, coordination with operator’s IT teams and workflow mapping, while the next six days are spent on training, readiness assessments and dry runs. After the vaccination centres go live, staff provide onsite user support to help with troubleshooting and issue resolution for the next week.

One Public Healthcare – Enhancing other HealthTech systems for comprehensive coverage of COVID-19 Vaccination Operations (VacOps)

Given the interconnectivity of our healthcare systems, enhancements were required to ensure all of them were optimised for COVID-19 vaccination operations’ (VacOps’) requirements. For example, to facilitate healthcare staff extraction and upload of vaccination records, HealthTech systems such as the Sunrise Clinical Manager (SCM), Next Generation Electronic Medical Record (NGEMR) and Staff Surveillance System (S3) had enhancements done to the reporting template to support different vaccination settings, and also to help with more efficient and accurate flow of information. These HealthTech systems were also configured to support vaccination records for staff in-situ at the institutions.

SharePoint Scheduler for Staff COVID-19 Vaccination

For smoother scheduling of public healthcare staff vaccination, a SharePoint Scheduler was developed so that department leads could schedule their staff for COVID-19 vaccination, and ensure that not everyone from the same team or department would be going at the same time. This lessened the risk of the entire team or department feeling unwell after COVID-19 vaccination. It also helped with not letting vaccines go to waste; for example, if someone scheduled for vaccination is unable to take the vaccine due to medical reasons, the next person on the schedule would be contacted to go for vaccination.

Enhancements were also made to the HealthHub mobile app to enable users to view their COVID-19 vaccination records together with their test results, making it more convenient for them. A patient can log in to check their appointment details on the go in case they forgot their appointment dates/times. After their vaccination, they can also log in to check on the details of the vaccination such as which brand and batch.

VacReconHub ensures timely and accurate submission of vaccination records

It has been said that “data is the new oil”. To help healthcare organisations have the most accurate possible data, a new HealthTech system, VacReconHub, was commissioned and a dedicated system team mobilised to proactively look into data submission and reconciliation between the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems and the National Immunisation Registry (NIR). This is critical from both clinical and patient perspective to ensure the timely and accurate vaccination record is submitted to the NIR, and also to ensure that patients are able to see the accurate vaccination records in HealthHub.

Through the automated reconciliation logic of VacReconHub system and VacRecon team’s further investigation, the team has identified issues in the following areas:

1. Erroneous data entry issues such as incorrectly entered vaccine batch number. It could be a case of typo, such as entering the batch number as “EK4273” instead of “EK4237”.


2. Patient identification issue, such as when a patient obtains Singapore citizenship between the first and second dose. During the first dose, the patient is registered with FIN number, however during the second dose, the patient is registered with NRIC number. As a result, there is only one COVID-19 vaccination record when using NRIC to search for vaccination records in NIR. Such issues will affect a patient’s ability to view his/her vaccination records in HealthHub, and also affect a patient’s vaccination certification.


3. System configuration issue. For example, in certain cases, the vaccination site is not correctly updated in the system, and as a result, the vaccination record is saved in the EMR system but rejected by the NIR.

To reconcile the issues, VacRecon team worked closely with EMR system and NIR team. They configured each EMR system and NIR to send vaccination records to a central VacReconHub system, which then identifies data submission issues and their root causes. These are then sent to the respective EMR and NIR teams to follow up on. Daily discussion sessions were held between each team to ensure each issue is resolved in a timely fashion, how the inherent system issues can be corrected and made more robust to reduce or prevent future reoccurrences. These efforts contribute to ensure a smooth vaccination operations (VacOps).

Compliments from our healthcare partners

“Through the process of tech-enabling the different settings – including the CCFs – in the last twelve months, we have gained a lot of insights and are using this institutional memory to propel ongoing efforts. For vaccination operations (VacOps), with the experience of setting up more than 60 vaccination sites/teams so far, we are sharing our learnings with each new operator as they come aboard, helping them to level-up quickly and start their operations efficiently.

I would like to thank all involved – both public and private healthcare staff, our technology partners and government authorities – for their partnership and support. The scale of our efforts in March is huge. We will be setting up a total of 17 vaccination centres, creating new mobile vaccination teams as well as helping other ministries like MOM, MTI start vaccinations. I am confident our teams will rise up to meet this challenge and help in us achieve our goal of getting Singapore vaccinated.”

Alan Goh, Deputy Chairman of the VacTech Work Group, IHiS

“We appreciate IHiS’ good work, especially from the enhancement and the stabilisation teams, in supporting our efforts at teching up all eight Singhealth Polyclinics for the vaccination programme. Thank you for the partnership!”

Dr Adrian Ee, Chief Executive Officer of SingHealth Polyclinics

“We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to the IHiS team for the training during set up and go-live phase of our Vaccination Centres. It was great collaboration between Fullerton and IHiS and we appreciate them as key partners on this journey.”

Alvin Lim, Group Technology and Information Security Director, Fullerton Healthcare Group Pte Ltd

“The support from IHiS has been exemplary. From the initial kickoff meeting after Healthway was awarded Canberra vaccination centre (VC), till the site went live, IHiS was contactable 24/7 and was extremely patient in helping my staff at vaccination centres and mobile vaccination teams. Alongside the guidance from MOH, IHiS staff also shared many valuable good practices and potential pitfalls. Without this tight tripartite collaboration, Canberra VC would not have gone live so successfully.”

Dr Ng Yew Yee, Head for Healthway Mobile, Healthway Medical Corporation

View related article: GPConnect Enhanced to Support COVID-19 Vaccination Operations (VacOps)