SINGAPORE organisations last night took three of the top five spots in the CIO Asia Awards, which are given to those with innovative IT practices.
The 'Final Five' were picked from a list of 100 firms.
The SingHealth group, Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) and NTUC Income were joined by two other winners, HSBC Bank Malaysia and PT Newmont Nusa Tenggara, an Indonesian mining company.
SingHealth, which comprises polyclinics and hospitals like Singapore General Hospital and Changi General Hospital, won for its pioneering role in putting out a central medical record system.
Mr Raoul Le Blond, editor of CIO Asia, the monthly technology magazine after which the awards are named, told The Straits Times yesterday that SingHealth's system stood out for its ability to ensure total patient record portability.
This means a patient's records can be accessed from any one of SingHealth's three hospitals, four national specialist centres and eight polyclinics.
'From an IT standpoint, to engineer this kind of information pooling is quite a feat,' he said.
SCDF was recognised for its online fire safety processing services, which help coordinate relief and rescue services in an emergency.
NTUC Income won for its ventures into the area of Web services - Net applications that allow for machine-to-machine communication and data-sharing that are seen as the next big thing in IT.
The CIO Asia Awards were first given out in 2001.