Prof Tan: 'Our vision is that of a digital hospital. We're not quite there yet, but we're on the way.'
By Roland Lim
IMAGINE being able to predict, with the help of computers, the kinds of diseases that you could pick up in the next few years. With technology advances in the area of healthcare, that could become the reality, as envisioned by the group chief executive of Singapore Health Services (SingHealth).
SingHealth CEO Tan Ser Kiat said in an interview: "Today's healthcare is reactive healthcare, while my vision is that of prospective healthcare." Prof Tan was speaking to BizIT ahead of his keynote address at the first Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Asia Pacific conference, held in Singapore this week.
He sees technology as a key factor that will enable healthcare to become targeted and individualised. For example, a doctor could pick out genes in individuals which are linked to certain diseases, combine it with the patient's family history and environmental factors, and "roughly predict" the diseases that he or she could come down with further down the road.
"This will enable us to start planning ahead, so as to be able to pick up and treat the disease early," he said, adding that the patient could then be sent for more frequent screenings, so as to detect the potential diseases early.
However, he admitted that while this was the ideal scenario he pictured, the reality is that surrounding these prospective healthcare technologies are many issues such as ethical and confidentiality considerations that have yet to be ironed out.
Meanwhile, Prof Tan noted that SingHealth has continued to invest in technology solutions, and the increase in investments has been "significant".
Solutions that it has already rolled out include its electronic medical record system, as well as digitising diagnosis reports such as X-rays. SGH has been filmless since 2005, with X-rays digitised and stored onto a centralised server so that a doctor can easily access them on a computer.
One of the innovations which SingHealth is piloting at the moment is a solution for doctors who, upon making a diagnosis, are able to link to related articles from two internationally renowned scientific and healthcare databases - OVID and The Cochrane Library, thus speeding up and facilitating research. "This is especially useful for researching rare and uncommon diseases," noted Prof Tan.
The National Heart Centre, one of the specialist centres under the SingHealth cluster, is also piloting an "ePaper" solution involving the use of tablet PCs, an Adobe digital paper application and a single sign-on solution from Encentuate, to speed up data input and access.
SingHealth also has an intellectual property (IP) office which looks at commercialisation possibilities for IP generated from SingHealth, which includes technology solutions.
Additionally, Prof Tan also said that SingHealth is always on the lookout for technologies which could help it deliver better quality care to its patients, as well as improve patient safety.
But like organisations in other industries, the resistance of some staff to change, cost, and lack of interoperability between systems were factors cited by Prof Tan as barriers to stronger adoption of technology in healthcare.
The healthcare industry is one of the focus sectors identified by the government as part of its iN2015 infocomm masterplan.
One of the initiatives that it is pursuing is to set up a nationwide standardised IT platform to allow the electronic medical records of both public and private healthcare providers to be shared.
"Our vision is that of a digital hospital. We're not quite there yet, but we're on the way," Prof Tan said confidently.