SPEECH BY MR GAN KIM YONG, MINISTER FOR HEALTH, AT THE OPENING CEREMONY OF HEALTHCARE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS SOCIETY (HIMSS) ASIAPAC14 - DIGITAL HEALTHCARE WEEK, 15 SEPT 2014

Colleagues and friends,

Distinguished speakers and guests,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Good morning

Introduction

1.            It gives me great pleasure to join you this morning to open the second HIMSS AsiaPac14 - Digital Healthcare Week. Firstly, I would like to extend a warm welcome to all our delegates, speakers, thought leaders, key executives and Information Technology experts from Singapore, Asia and beyond.

Role of Information Technology

2.            Information Technology has become an indispensable part of our existence, intersecting almost all aspects of our lives. It has come to play a very important role in healthcare too, from ordering of medication to having electronic medical records to facilitate timely access to information. IT holds the promise of helping us better meet the needs of an ageing population, an issue Singapore as well as many other healthcare systems around the world are grappling today.

3.            There is much ongoing research on how IT and its adoption can make a difference in the delivery of healthcare services. For example, a 2013 study[1] found that clinicians in the United States were wasting an average of 46 minutes a day on outdated communications technologies, due to inefficient pager systems, a lack of Wi-Fi, inadequacy of email and inability to communicate via text message. Not only was this estimated to cost the average hospital almost US$1 million a year, but it significantly reduced the amount of time these clinicians could have spent caring for their patients. Another study[2] in 2012 on the impact of artificial intelligence in medicine found that by running patient data through an artificial intelligence framework, doctors were able to find the right treatments faster and reduce unnecessary patient visits, while obtaining about 50% improvement in outcome for roughly half the cost.

Healthcare IT Master Plan

4.         Recognising the importance of IT in Singapore healthcare, the Ministry of Health (MOH), MOH Holdings and its institutions conceptualised the Healthcare IT Master Plan, which articulates our vision and roadmap for the use of IT in healthcare in the coming years. It is closely aligned with the overarching objective of providing quality healthcare services that will be both accessible and affordable to Singaporeans.

5.         Over and above the traditional approach of leveraging emergent and mature technologies by healthcare providers to improve care outcome and operational excellence, the IT master plan emphasises focus on the use of analytics to better understand our population and allows our healthcare services to be more targeted, for example in disease  prevention programmes. It will help build capabilities through which people will be placed at the centre of the healthcare services delivery. No matter which healthcare institutions they visit, their health information will be made available across the various institutions thus ensuring the continuity of care.

6.         Acknowledging that we have a population that is increasingly connected and IT savvy, the IT master plan will also focus on how we can empower our population to self-manage their healthcare.

7.         As our population ages, more families will be empowered with convenient access to quality health care. But this can also be challenging when family units are becoming smaller, and more elderly are living apart from their family members with less caregiver support. Telehealth can help us bring services closer to our patients and their families. It can also provide more consistent and regular remote monitoring of patients’ health status and vital signs to facilitate timely intervention where necessary. Let’s look at stroke for example. The first three to six months after a person suffers a stroke are extremely critical for the patients to achieve better functional recovery. However, many of them face physical, social and financial barriers that hinder their ability to get continual, supervised rehabilitation after their discharge from hospitals. Tele-rehabilitation allows stroke patients to perform rehabilitative exercises or physiotherapy in the comfort of their own homes, leveraging the convenience of communication technology. This translates into time and cost savings for the patients, not to mention increased productivity for allied health professionals. It also offers better access to good quality care compared to physical visits to a rehabilitation centre.

8.         Along with information sharing between the healthcare sector and relevant entities, the model of care needs to be transformed concurrently to achieve the intended healthcare outcomes. This further reinforces the need for integrating and sharing medical records nationwide. The National Electronic Health Record (NEHR) offers a holistic view of patient records across healthcare settings, providing a summary of a patient’s medical history to support clinical decision making. Since 2011, the NEHR has been successfully rolled out in over 280 institutions across the healthcare sector, providing over 14,000 clinicians with the information they need to ensure continuity of care. More recently, electronic information exchange has moved into the private sector in primary care and Intermediate and Long Term Care sectors, extending its use in community hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, community-base care providers, as well as over 230 GP clinics. Forging ahead, future capabilities such as image sharing, care and case management will bring us closer towards realising the vision of “One Patient, One Medical Record” for Singapore.

Singapore’s Progress in Healthcare IT

9.         Singapore is a part of the Asia-Pacific region, which is one of the most diverse and challenging landscapes when it comes to healthcare and technology. Across the region, healthcare practitioners are confronted with varying stages of development and technological implementation. Each country, city and even institution has its own array of unique challenges that can hinder the successful implementation of technology.

10.       The participation of Asia Pacific’s major institutions, both public and private, from around 30 countries, in  HIMSS AsiaPac14 reflects the commitment by these institutions to bring their IT and communications systems up to the highest achievable levels under HIMSS Analytics Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model, or EMRAM.

11.       A high proportion of public hospitals in Singapore are awarded with the EMRAM Stage 6 certification, and we see this event as a platform for our institutions and practitioners to interact with global thought leaders and technology providers, and to identify areas for improvement so as to provide better care for our patients.

Conclusion

12.       With a very distinguished and exciting line-up of speakers and almost 50 exhibitors at HIMSS AsiaPac14, we can all look forward to a lively exchange of ideas, best practices and the latest technology from practitioners and delegates from across the region.

13.       I hope that these few days will provide you with the ideas, impetus and innovations, to help advance the standard of health care throughout Asia Pacific and beyond. I wish you a fruitful conference, and, for our foreign delegates, have an enjoyable stay here in Singapore.

14.       Thank you.

[1] ‘The Economic and Productivity Impact of IT Security on Healthcare’, Ponemon Institute LLC, May 2013.  (http://pages.imprivata.com/rs/imprivata/images/ponemon_economic_producivity_impact_ar.pdf)

[2] ‘Artificial intelligence framework for simulating clinical decision-making: A Markov decision process approach’, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, December 2012 (http://www.aiimjournal.com/article/S0933-3657(12)00151-0/abstract?cc=y?cc=y)