Ngiam Siew Ying Shares How Tech is Transforming Public Healthcare

FROM REACTION TO PREVENTION: Tech is Keeping Everyone in the Pink of Health

NGIAM SIEW YING

Member, SCS Chief Executive Officer, IHiS Age: 45 Earliest Tech Experience: Computer Science 101 at university Currently Reading: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg Apps You Can’t Live Without: Telegram and WhatsApp (and HealthHub because it has made such a difference to how we interact with the healthcare system) Pet Topic of the Moment: Building good organisational culture Favourite Way to Relax: Taking long hikes and watching cooking shows

In March 2022, the Ministry of Health announced the next radical step for population health in Singapore. Moving away from ‘reactive’ healthcare, Healthier SG adopts a preventive model to ensure Singaporeans stay healthy – reducing the need for healthcare interventions. But how can Singapore achieve that, and what role does tech play? The IT Society speaks to IHiS’ new CEO, Ngiam Siew Ying to find out how tech has enabled better care, how IHiS keeps sensitive data safe, what it takes for healthtech projects to be successful, and what’s in store for public healthcare in Singapore.

Q: Question, SY: Siew Ying

Q: What would you say are the greatest benefits that tech has brought to public health?

SY: The first that comes to mind is how tech has enabled us to provide better care at speed and scale. Now that most healthcare providers are digitalised, systems are linked and we have a health data grid in the back, no matter which setting a patient goes to, doctors can quickly pull out past history, allergies and recent issues as needed – something that would have been impossible in the past when we were still reliant on paper records. For patients, this means they no longer need to repeat tests that they had already done and precious minutes saved in an emergency. For clinicians, critical information is available at a click, clinical processes can be more efficient, and there is less paperwork to deal with. The other area that I find exciting is the use of big data and analytics capabilities. With the widespread digitalisation of our systems, we can now pull data together and analyse it for predictive insights. Analytics helps us better target interventions – for example, we can pick up at-risk groups who are likely to have medical concerns and focus our interventions accordingly. Without this, we would have to expend resources very bluntly on a large number of people, in the hope that we land on the right persons.

Q: There has been growing public concern about issues like security, data privacy and ethics. What is IHiS doing to address these concerns?

SY: In general, we use a layered defence approach with multiple controls at each level. For data like health information, they are secured behind multiple walls so granting access is intentional rather than accidental. Auditing is also carried out periodically to check if data accesses were for legitimate reasons.

In addition, we keep ourselves up-to-date on cybersecurity trends and learn from others to improve what we are doing. For example, when news broke about the banks’ SMS phishing incidents late last year, we immediately checked all our systems. Because for IHiS, we are serious about protecting what we have under our care, responsibly.

We do often have to strike a balance between usability needed for operations and best security practices. Systems are built to support user processes and ease of use – clickable SMSes for making