Singapore Health Services (SingHealth), the largest healthcare provider in Singapore has received a prestigious award for best of IT to add value to an organisation for its implementation of an iSOFT-based electronic medical record (EMR) system, which has successfully been integrated across all the group’s hospitals. The main application SingHealth has used to develop its EMR system is iSOFT’s iClinical Manager solution, which it began using in 2000. The SingHealth group is Singapore’s leading public healthcare provider. The group includes three hospitals, four National Specialist Centres and a network of eight polyclinics, providing seamless integrated, treatment and care. iClinical Manager has been deployed to deliver an integrated EMR across the whole of SingHealth. The system provides up to 2,000 concurrent healthcare professionals with access to real-time clinical information, from point of care order entry, laboratory and radiology results, drugs prescription and administration, through to discharge summaries. As a result of SingHealth is now able to provide aggregated information on its patients, through a common EMR front-end, that allows clinicians online access to a full range of patient medical information for timely and informed decisions making. SingHealth received the award from CIO Asia magazine’s annual listing of the top 100 businesses. The ‘Final Five’ award winners are selected by the magazine as leading examples of organisations using IT to rapidly transform their industry by delivering innovative products and/or services. The award citation says SingHealth is seeking the “Holy Grail of healthcare IT – portable, secure and instantly available medical information that can help doctors deliver healthcare quickly and reliably. Group CIO for SingHealth Chng Wong Yin says the roll-out of its electronic medical records system to its entire cluster of institutions has heralded a new age in the delivery of healthcare. “We believe it is a great step forward in the collection, organisation and delivery of healthcare information across our institutions. We established a common platform for the EMR right from the beginning. This ‘ground up’ approach to conceptualising, testing, reviewing and implementing the EMR proved to be more beneficial than trying to integrate a number of smaller scale but different systems that some of the hospitals had implemented previously.” He added: "As a public healthcare provider, we have always been mindful of the importance of bringing value to our patients and staff while containing costs. IT has always played an important role in driving excellence in patient care, service integration and operational efficiency at SingHealth." "The implementation of the cluster-wide electronic medical records system marks the first achievement of Singapore Health Services towards realising its goal of electronic health delivery. On the same note, it was the powerful combination of our infrastructure, application systems and team members that also enabled us to respond swiftly to the intense onset of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak that swept the region in 2003.” iSOFT’s Chief Executive Officer Tim Whiston said, “SingHealth has consistently demonstrated its ability to leverage forward referencing technologies to deliver leading edge patient care.”
