Government seeks ICT solutions to improve healthcare delivery processes
ConvergenceAsia staff
04/10/2007

The Ministry of Health (MOH), the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and The Enterprise Challenge (TEC) under the Prime Minister's Office today launched a joint Healthcare Call-for-Collaboration (CFC).

This collaboration aims to exploit IT maximally, as a key enabler in healthcare transformation and to promote innovation to change work processes and how care is delivered. It seeks infocomm (ICT) solutions to improve cost-efficiency and quality of healthcare delivery for the nation’s public and private healthcare institutions.

The tripartite working collaboration will invest an amount of $3 million to encourage innovations in the following areas:

- Delivering safer care by enhancing medication safety, reducing healthcare associated infections, improving communication among healthcare practitioners during patient handovers and ensuring right site procedures (for example, right implant and right patient).

- Enhancing quality of care by providing care the patient needs according to best medical science and evidence available today (e.g. timely information to support decision making), improving the continuity of care and reducing reworks (e.g. re-admission, repeat procedures, etc.).

- Achieving greater efficiency in healthcare operations by facilitating re-engineering of workflows and simplification and standardisation of processes.
 
The collaboration is part of IDA's iN2015 plan for the Healthcare sector to better leverage ICT effectively to enable innovation in healthcare delivery processes. TEC, which is an initiative to harness innovative ideas for the Public Service, will provide support for the trial testing of innovative ideas that has the potential to create new value and bring about improvements in the delivery of public services.

Details on the joint Healthcare CFC can be found on www.healthcareit.com.sg.

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