22 May 2007
Healthy view (ST Digital Life, 22 May 2007)
- A bird's-eye view and specialised technical skills are what IT professionals need to work in health care

Infocomm technology professionals who see the big picture are rare.

But these are the people the health-care clusters here want.

'We need IT people who can see the forest from the trees, (they are) architects who can put all the different IT systems together,' said Mr Linus Tham, chief information officer of the National Healthcare Group (NHG).

For example, someone who knows how the X-ray system relates to the billing, registration and test ordering systems. To achieve that, these IT architects must have a good knowledge of how hospitals, doctors and nurses work.

They also need to understand the business aspect of health care so that they can design IT systems which are relevant to the industry.

'Our IT staff have to manage projects involving interfaces with clinicians and patients, and understand the issues they face,' said Mr Fong Choon Khin, the group chief technology officer of SingHealth, who also sits on the Infocomm Development Authority's professional development work group.

With the Health Ministry working towards an Electronic Medical Records system, which allows sharing of patient information by linking hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and labs, these technology architects are in great demand.

For these IT architects, a cursory knowledge of the health-care industry is not enough. Because most off-the-shelf health-care IT systems are made for US hospitals, IT professionals here need to understand the hospital culture in Singapore to adapt them for local use.

An IT system that requires data-entry might work for doctors in the US who have more time for consultations.

But in Singapore, where patient-doctor ratios are high, five minutes spent on data entry can mean that doctors lose a third of the time they could have spent on consultation.

NHG has taken to grooming IT architects, rather than hiring them straight out from school.

At SingHealth, a medical informatics career track was started to give doctors and nurses more opportunities to participate in IT-related fields.

Challenging work

Integrating IT systems into health-care institutions is challenging, because it takes time for doctors and nurses to change the way they work, said Mr Tham.

At NHG, doctors are also encouraged to take the lead in rolling out IT systems.

'We don't interact directly with patients, but we interact with the people who do,' said Mr Tham.

- By Tham Yuen-C