SingHealth worked with IHiS to digitalise the process of manual data entries for mass swabbing at the dormitories and quarantine facilities, as well as to automise the massive tasks of registration and laboratory orders for COVID-19 patients.

For example, due to the short notice period and rapidly evolving situation, time was needed to gather and move the necessary IT equipment to the sites. Hence, after the swab tests were done at the start, the labels had to be handwritten instead of printed before being stuck on. As the IT equipment progressively came in, a quick registration and sticky label programme using Excel Macro that was developed previously by Dr Mak Lai Peng from Sengkang General Hospital was deployed to help quicken the registration programme. The programme automatically sends the registration details to be printed on labels, which helped to minimise both the risk of errors and amount of time needed for patient registration from nearly three minutes to a mere 15 seconds. SingHealth staff and IHiS later helped to iteratively enhance this programme and has since deployed the Macro programme in more than 12 dormitories under SingHealth to support medical post setup, mass swabbing and serological registration.

“I developed the Excel Macro programme about a year ago, primarily to reduce waiting time and administrative work when we run the twice yearly flu vaccination exercise for staff. It proved to be a speedy way of registration, and was simple enough to use such that users required no training. The programme also made the printing of sticky labels possible and avoided the problem of manual handwriting, which can sometimes be illegible. It took me about 2-3 days to develop the programme, and I learned how to do so from Youtube and relevant websites. I discovered that it is really fascinating what you can do with Excel. I am very glad staff have found the programme helpful and adapted it for dormitory operations to streamline their work in the fight against COVID-19,” said Dr Mak Lai Peng, Principal Resident Physician, Department of Occupational Medicine, Sengkang General Hospital.

A MOH requirement was that COVID-19 registration and laboratory orders data had to be transmitted to other systems such as the NEHR and CTR. To ensure that the enhancements did not disrupt normal operations, IHiS had to work quickly to tweak the system’s backend to ensure the necessary integration. While on the surface this seemed easy, the process involved a lot of coordination and was made more complicated due to the systems’ limitations, such as each laboratory using different systems with no standardisation of recording the data. As such, IHiS staff had to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution such that it could interface with the different systems smoothly.

Janel Loke, Senior Manager at IHiS and who leads the SingHealth Lab Systems team, said:

“It isn’t always about using cutting edge technology. Often times, it’s about using what is already available and repackaging it for other purposes, which is what we have done here. I am grateful for the tremendous support the multi-disciplinary SingHealth and IHiS teams have given to ensure that this project ran smoothly. With so many people doing their part, we will pull through this pandemic together!”