Caring for the large number of COVID-19 patients requires enormous effort across many organisations. Several solutions were needed to co-ordinate and provide real-time visibility on patient flow to monitor the situation on the ground and even predict situations to guide decision-making so as to provide timely healthcare interventions.

To cater to the surging number of COVID-19 patients, Community Care Facilities (CCFs) were set up at the Singapore Expo Convention Hall (CCF@Expo). With the experience harnessed from the operationalisation of CCF@Expo, other CCFs were set up or tech-enabled in much quicker fashion and went live in May 2020. IHiS and our partners will be leveraging the learning points and successes to improve tech-deployment and support at successive facilities when required.

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 Solution

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.

COVID-19 Technology for CCFs at a Glance

In this 3-part article, we take a look at how technology has evolved to better support our CCFs.

CCF On-Boarding Portal – Click to read about the agile and collaborative process of building and deploying a single source of truth portal to facilitate the transfer of patients from the public healthcare institutions to the CCFs.

GPConnect – Discover the evolutionary enhancements to optimise the workflow of users at the CCFs to meet the needs of clinicians facing different site constraints.

Health Discovery – Find out how the team created and purpose built an integrated system that provides real time interaction and data feed for remote vital signs monitoring in record time.