Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan believed that the whole healthcare ecosystem can be transformed with the use of IT as a key enabler

At the inaugural Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) AsiaPac 2007 conference in Singapore, Minister of Health Mr Khaw Boon Wan said that information technology can help overcome the huge hurdles needed to transform healthcare and help contain rising healthcare costs, at the same time ensuring access to quality healthcare.

"Simply throwing money at the problem is not the answer. Money is necessary but not sufficient in ensuring a better healthcare system," the Health Minister said. According to Mr Khaw, what is needed are environments that encourage innovation and a changing of mindsets to one that is aligned to transforming healthcare.

Seamless, integrated care for patients across the whole healthcare ecosystem can be achieved with the use of IT as a key enabler in healthcare transformation. To date, IT has made some progress in the medical sector with Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) being used in many institutions. The challenge according to Mr Khaw is to take things to the next level, where healthcare delivery is integrated on a national level, between primary-tertiary-step-down care, and between public and private sector institutions.

"We all say that healthcare providers should treat patients holistically as a team, share information about the patients and partner one another to bring care to the patients, without duplicating efforts or replicating tests," Mr Khaw said. Unfortunately, the reality is often different with relatively few doctors, clinics and hospitals in the world consistently practise pro-active prevention regimes. Many chronically-ill patients are not receiving appropriate care at the appropriate level, and continue to be treated in more expensive tertiary settings.

To achieve this, the Minister said that inter-operability and data exchange are key to transformation, requiring the setting of data and systems standards and ensuring that they are widely adopted.

Professor Tan Ser Kiat, Group CEO of Singapore Health Services, delivered the opening keynote at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Asia-Pacific 2007 conference

In Singapore, the government has already undertaken steps to ensure that patients get the care they deserve. Public hospitals in both the SingHealth and the National Healthcare Group (NHG) clusters have integrated their respective EMR systems. "We have put in place the EMR Exchange or EMRX to allow cross-cluster exchange of patient information such as inpatient discharge summaries, laboratory and radiology reports, drug allergies and medical alerts, and recently, x-ray images. Immunisation and school health records of children are also available to the hospitals," Mr Khaw added.

The next major steps are to set national data and IT standards and to put in place the legislative framework for data protection. "These will provide the foundation on which we will build a national electronic health records database containing critical health records of every Singaporean," Mr Khaw said.

The goal will be to have all healthcare institutions – public and private sector hospitals, primary healthcare clinics, step-down care institutions – linked to this national database, accessing and providing real-time clinical information of the patients they are treating. "Beyond care provision, the database will also provide powerful applications, facilitating clinical research as well as epidemiological surveillance," he added.

Beyond these technical issues, Mr Khaw also said that there are many other issues that need to be addressed. These include system security, data protection, privacy, regulation and audit. While such issues can be difficult, the Health Minister said that we can take heart that other industries have faced the same issues and have successfully overcome them. "It can be done," he said.