Health Buddy Notifications - FAQs

1. Notifications via SingHealth’s Health Buddy app are a safe and secure way to receive all your appointment-related information from SingHealth Hospitals, Centres, and Polyclinics. This assures that messages and any embedded links are genuinely from SingHealth, helping to protect you and your loved ones from SMS scams and malicious links.
2. If you are a caregiver, both you and the patient (your dependant) may choose to receive message notifications on your respective mobile devices via the Health Buddy app. Additionally, when more than one caregiver supports the same dependant, switching to app notifications enables multiple caregivers to receive updates—unlike SMS, which only supports a single recipient.
3. You may organize your messages and notifications by Category and Persons for easier reference within the app. This organizational feature is not available with standard SMS.

How to Start Receiving Notifications

It’s simple! Follow these steps to start receiving notifications:

1. Download and launch the Health Buddy app.
2. Click the ‘More’ tab at the bottom of your screen.
   
3. Under settings, click ‘Notification Preference’.
   
4. Login via SingPass on the Notifications screen.
5. Click ‘Activate My Device’ and you’re all done.
   

Once you activate notifications, you will not receive SMSes for appointment-related reminders from SingHealth.

Yes, you may switch back at any time. Simply go to your Notification Preferences, and toggle OFF on the ‘Allow Notifications’ button.

IMPORTANT: If any of your authorised caregivers or next-of-kin have activated to receive your SingHealth notifications, you will still not receive SMS. SMS will only resume when:

• No caregiver is receiving notifications on your behalf; and
• You have turned OFF the “Allow Notifications” setting under Health Buddy > Notification Preferences.

No, you do not need to login via SingPass to view your new or past messages. You only need to login to SingPass once when activating your device to authorize notifications on Health Buddy. After activation, you can view your all your notifications in Health Buddy app without the need to login.

Once you activate notifications, you will receive the following types of messages through the Health Buddy app:

• Appointment Reminder messages
• Bill/Payment Reminder messages
• Queue (Mobile Registration) Reminder messages
• Dependant / Authorised Caregiver Push Notification Activation/Deactivation messages

For any other types of messages, you will continue to receive them as SMS until we gradually update our systems to onboard them to notifications as well.

Yes, you can nominate up to 10 registered caregivers to receive your notifications. Please approach our counter staff with your caregiver/dependant and present your NRICs for verification to register as authorized caregiver(s). Once registered, your caregiver (s) can open Health Buddy app to ‘activate’ the link to start receiving notifications for you.

If you are the patient, you and your caregiver(s) need to present your NRICs for verification to first register as an authorized caregivers. Once that is done, your caregiver will need to use the Health Buddy app to activate the link.

Q10. I am a caregiver. How do I ‘activate’ the link so that I can receive notifications for my dependant?

To ‘activate’ the link and start receiving your dependant’s notifications, follow these steps:

1. Click the ‘More’ tab at the bottom of your screen
2. Under settings click ‘Notification Preference’
3. ‘Click here’ for Caregivers and Dependants
4. Click ‘Activate’ for the dependant that you wish to receive notifications for

On Health Buddy app, you may view whether your nominated caregiver(s) is receiving your notifications or not. To remove a caregiver from the hospital system, please approach our clinic counters to request for the caregiver link to be deactivated. Once deactivated, this caregiver will no longer receive your notifications.

Before your caregiver or dependant is reflected in Health Buddy, you will need to register the caregiver-dependant link at our hospitals and centres.

Click here to learn more

If you want to be removed as a caregiver, please email hbsupport@singhealth.com.sg with these details:

• Your Full Name + NRIC (i.e. Caregiver)
• Full Name + NRIC (i.e. Dependant(s) to remove)
• Name of hospital Dependant(s) was registered as a patient

You (caregiver) will begin to receive notifications for your dependant. Your dependant will no longer receive SMS. Please advise your dependant to activate notifications on Health Buddy app on his own mobile device, so that he will receive notifications as well.

You can tag the identity of each device to ONE unique person/NRIC only. For your security, if there is an attempt to activate an additional NRIC identity to the same phone, an error message will appear.

If you own or have bought a second-hand mobile phone, you will need to factory reset your phone or contact the owner of the other NRIC (original owner of the mobile phone) to remove the device from his/her ‘Notification Preference’.

To view your notifications on all your devices, you will have to activate each device individually. (See question 1)

No, notifications for Health Buddy in your phone settings will not be automatically turned on if it was turned off previously. You will still receive your new messages in your inbox but you will not be alerted/ receive any notification banners whenever you receive a new SingHealth notification message. We recommend that you check and ensure you have allowed Notifications for Health Buddy on your device.

No, you will not. To receive push notifications in Health Buddy app again, please turn on notifications for Health Buddy under your phone’s settings.