Case Study

Bringing unified healthcare

To every patient in Singapore.

Challenge
What Accenture Did
People and Culture
Value Delivered
Meet the Team

Challenge

MOH Holdings (MOHH), the holding company of Singapore’s public healthcare assets, undertakes strategic initiatives for Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH) and public healthcare institutions.

These include managing the training and employment of junior doctors, recruiting of healthcare staff, and providing corporate advisory services and support to Singapore’s public health system.

When the Ministry of Health (MOH) turned to MOHH to create the National Electronic Health Record (NEHR), they had a goal to improve the quality of healthcare for all patients by increasing patient safety, lowering healthcare costs and developing more effective health policies.

The vision of "'One Patient, One Health Record" was a single, unified health record for each patient, enabling clinicians to have more timely and accurate health information at the point of care to support effective prevention, diagnosis and management of illness.

What Accenture did

MOHH initially engaged Accenture to help develop an architecture blueprint for the NEHR system.

This blueprint detailed the business, information, application and technology architectures. MOHH selected Accenture because it brought relevant expertise and demonstrated success in projects of similar scale and complexity.

Accenture and MOHH then began deploying the NEHR to provide clinicians with a summary care record for each patient including problem lists, medications, discharge and event summaries, allergies, immunizations, investigations, and procedures. Accenture’s health and technical specialists provided program, project, and release management, and integrated the underlying applications that made up the NEHR system. They also assessed the functionality the system needed to provide immediately and in the longer term.

Accenture and MOHH worked together to create the NEHR system using a common application architecture, as well as common data standards, and privacy and security guidelines. The integrated database and security solution consist of Oracle® Healthcare Transaction Base and several components of Oracle Fusion Middleware. The system uses the Orion Health Concerto Portal for the user interface, and Initiate’s Enterprise Master Patient Index to maintain patients’ demographic information and match their details from multiple source applications.

Accenture staff in Singapore, Bangalore and Prague used Accenture project methodologies and program management tools to complete the technical build of the national system within 10 months.

People and culture

Embarking on this ambitious statewide healthcare transformation program, Accenture and MOHH teams partnered to jointly tread the fine line between complexity and innovation for a program this scale. The feasibility and the architecture development were conducted across departments with a nimble collaboration to achieve greater efficiency and cost effectiveness to Singapore’s healthcare service delivery.

The NEHR system is now helping clinicians by providing the right information to enable better diagnosis and development of treatment plans. The NEHR is also helping eliminate duplicate tests, provides a consolidated view of medical episodes in public institutions, and is used to analyze health trends for the better management of diseases. The program has transformed the way healthcare is being delivered in Singapore.

Value delivered

The first phase went live with the entire technical solution, all physical system components and data center equipment in a fully tested and approved state.

This was followed by the synchronization and integration of the NEHR system with existing legacy systems. The long-term goal of the NEHR is to allow primary, acute and community-care clinicians access to shared clinical data that help to enhance medical treatment and improve patient safety. In the future, it could help analyze health trends and better manage disease.

Within a year later, clinicians from all public healthcare institutions, selected community hospitals and general practitioners (GPs) will have access to the NEHR system. The NEHR will help provide the right information at the right time to assist with the development of diagnosis and treatment plans and help eliminate duplicate tests and medication errors.

It is a big step toward realizing the vision of One Patient, One Health Record.

This program is revolutionizing healthcare services in Singapore. According to Dr Sarah Muttitt, the then Chief Information Officer, Information Systems Division, at MOHH, the goal is for all Singapore health organizations to have real-time clinical information for treating patients.