National Healthcare Group: Integrated Health Care for Singapore

Based on its proven experience in driving large-scale transformational programs, the National Healthcare Group (NHG) in Singapore turned to Accenture to help it deliver integrated care across the patient management, procurement, and financial areas—and to make the NHG Care Experience a reality.

To understand the NHG transformation, view the video.

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The National Healthcare Group (NHG) in Singapore provides public health care services through a network of four hospitals, one national center, nine polyclinics, three specialty institutes and five business divisions. The NHG employs more than 11,000 health care workers and generates more than US$1 billion in revenue annually. NHG accounts for nearly half of the public health care volume in Singapore.

The mission of NHG is: "To improve health and reduce illness through patient-centered quality health care that is accessible and seamless, comprehensive, appropriate and cost-effective in an environment of continuous learning and relevant research." To deliver on that mission, NHG needed to consolidate and integrate the operations of its disparate organizations.

In 2004, NHG chose Accenture based on its proven experience and because Accenture could deliver beyond pure systems integration to areas like change management and process redesign.

The program developed by Accenture and NHG team was christened Nauticus. Nauticus began with an extensive process harmonization phase involving participants from the five NHG divisions. The process harmonization effort sought to review and rationalize existing processes and provide a base set of processes within and across institutions to raise the bar on performance. Once the process harmonization stage was complete, Accenture designed and developed the application systems and delivered those to 6,000 users, including nurses, hospital administrators and back-office personnel across NHG hospitals and headquarters.

Now that the Nauticus program is deployed in the major NHG facilities, it has helped create new levels of business performance within the organization including:

• Patient admissions and registration often take a matter of seconds not minutes.
  
  
• Patient experience and preferences identified at one hospital are known to all other hospitals.
  
  
• NHG’s general practitioner network is linked into hospitals for referral appointment scheduling that takes place through the Nauticus system.
  
  
• Patients can self-register with the swipe of a registration card, making the process easier for patients and saving hospital resources.
  
  
• Hospital administrators can view bed availability within a hospital and across the cluster through a custom-developed bed management module.
  
  
• Patients of NHG hospitals receive bills with standardized formats that are easy to understand.
  
  
• Electronic procurement and purchasing has delivered productivity benefits to the materials management department.
  
  
• The common view of materials and vendors supports the newly formed Group Procurement Office that will use strategic sourcing and negotiate contracts to achieve procurement synergies and cost savings.
  
  
• IT cost savings have been achieved through consolidation to a common hardware and software platform.
  
  “This has been our most ambitious integration project to date. And although change is always painful, it is necessary if we are to continue to put patients first. This project would not have been possible without the dedication of our staff, and our partner Accenture. But the hard work is worth it and our NHG patients are the real winners.”—Lim Suet Wun, CEO, National Healthcare Group

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