MEDIA RELEASE

Singapore, 30 July 2025 – Identifying key medical issues and optimising patient's health before surgery often require doctors at Singapore General Hospital’s (SGH) Preoperative Assessment Clinic (PAC) to pore over more than 400 pages of constantly evolving perioperative[1] guidelines. The sheer volume and frequent updates make consistent adherence challenging, potentially leading to suboptimal preparation for surgery and postponement of surgery, while adding significantly to doctors' administrative workload. 

Enter PEACH (PErioperative AI Chatbot), a clinical decision support system developed by SGH, where doctors simply input relevant patient information from electronic health records into the chatbot to perform various tasks. These include answering perioperative-related anaesthesia questions, drafting referral letters and patient instructions, summarising key anaesthesia-related issues, and generating perioperative care plans.

 “PEACH represents a significant step forward in how we manage preoperative assessments. By integrating our comprehensive perioperative guidelines with AI technology, we've created a tool that not only enhances patient safety but also helps doctors make more efficient and consistent decisions,” says Dr Ke Yuhe, Associate Consultant, Department of Anaesthesiology, SGH, who led the development of PEACH. 

Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as powerful healthcare tools but their use with clinical data raises substantial data privacy and information security concerns. To mitigate these issues, Dr Ke and her team integrated SGH’s perioperative guidelines into PAIR, an AI assistant created by Open Government Products (OGP), accessible only on hospital-issued encrypted laptops. OGP is an experimental development team within the Singapore Government. 

The chatbot can also triage pre-surgery patients, recommending if assessment should be conducted via phone, in-person at PAC, or on surgery day. This capability potentially helps reduce waiting time at PAC, which sees about 25,000 pre-surgery patients annually, allowing doctors to focus on complex cases and minimising unnecessary hospital visits.

Two comprehensive studies validated PEACH’s effectiveness, leading to Singapore’s Health Sciences Authority’s approval for its deployment in healthcare setting, including SGH. The first study in November 2024, examining 240 PEACH interactions, demonstrated about 98 per cent accuracy in making pre-surgery recommendations, with minimal hallucination[2] (less than 2 per cent) and guideline deviation rate (less than 1 per cent). 

The second study, conducted between January and February 2025 across more than 270 actual patient assessments, showed that doctors primarily used PEACH for complex cases. They were also asked to rate the chatbot from 1 to 5 and it scored 4.94 for safety, 4.81 for explainability, and 4.72 for comprehensibility. Human reviewers confirmed output accuracy across the studied cases, with PEACH proving particularly effective in handling medium-complexity cases, reducing documentation time by nearly 6 minutes per patient. Overall, PEACH implementation was projected to save over 600 junior doctor-hours and close to 60 senior doctor-hours annually. 

"What excites me most about PEACH is how it's transforming our clinical workflow at PAC. When you're seeing thousands of pre-surgery patients annually, every minute saved on administrative tasks is a minute gained for patient care," shares Associate Professor Hairil Rizal, Senior Consultant and Clinician Scientist, Department of Anaesthesiology, SGH. "Our studies show that doctors are confidently using PEACH for complex cases, and the system's ability to triage patients effectively means we can better allocate our resources where they're needed most. This is about working smarter to deliver better care," adds the senior author of both studies. 

Findings of the studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals, npj Digital Medicine (part of Nature Portfolio) in July 2025 and presented at an annual congress in anaesthesiology and intensive care, Euroanesthesia, in May 2025. 

For media enquiries, please contact:

Carol Ang (Ms)                                                                     
Communications Department        
Singapore General Hospital                            
Email: carol.ang@sgh.com.sg

^{[1] Perioperative refers to the entire period surrounding a surgical procedure, including the time before surgery (preoperative), during the surgery (intraoperative), and after surgery (postoperative).}

^{[2] Hallucination refers to when an AI system generates information that appears plausible but is actually false or made up.}