This story is part of the "Together, We" campaign, celebrating more than 100 teams at Synapxe and their role in transforming Singapore’s public healthcare. You may read the previous story about our Software Engineering & Development team (SEED) here.
Behind NEHR: Building Singapore's unified health record system
The National Electronic Health Record (NEHR) is Singapore's cornerstone for achieving "One Patient, One Health Record".
The NEHR consolidates patients' selected health information from different healthcare settings into a comprehensive healthcare history. This enables care teams to make more informed decisions, provide accurate diagnoses, and deliver safer, more personalised patient care. Whether you visit a GP clinic, polyclinic, specialist clinic or hospital, your medical information contributes to a complete picture that follows you throughout your healthcare journey.
Here are some of the teams that work tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure NEHR remains secure, reliable, and ready to support Singapore's healthcare transformation.
1. NEHR Critical Information Infrastructure (CII) Boundary: Securing Singapore's national health data infrastructure
CSA, MOH and Synapxe worked together to implement the technical infrastructure needed to prepare Singapore's National Electronic Health Record (NEHR) system for Critical Information Infrastructure designation. Their focus was on ensuring NEHR meets stringent cybersecurity requirements whilst maintaining secure access to health data that supports patient care nationwide.
The team's greatest challenge was balancing the tight NEHR Rebuild timeline with implementing comprehensive security controls that complied with regulations while defending against cybersecurity threats, all without compromising system functionality for healthcare providers. The joint effort among teams helped foster trust and build stronger working relationships, enabling more open collaborative discussions and knowledge exchange that improved understanding of policy requirements and expectations, resulting in reduced uncertainty and better preparedness for regulatory compliance.
The teams overcame several significant challenges throughout this transformation. For example, the AI team tackled technical hurdles including building an automated content synchronisation pipeline to keep health information current, developing intent classifiers to handle different query types appropriately, and training the system to understand local healthcare terminology across multiple languages. Also, the payment team migrated intricate payment workflows within tight two-month deadlines, while the foundation team developed comprehensive common services to reduce development complexity.
“TOGETHER, WE safeguard NEHR through strong cybersecurity governance”- NEHR CII Boundary Team
2. NEHR-HEALIX Integration: Powering national health programmes with secure data exchange
The NEHR-HEALIX Integration team focused on enhancing the data transfer process between NEHR and our HEALIX analytics platform to provide continuous support for critical national health initiatives. Their work enables a range of important programmes including AI-assisted chronic disease analysis, the National Diabetes Database, and the Active Safety Surveillance System for monitoring adverse reactions to medicines and vaccines.
The team's primary challenge involved meeting tight timelines for vulnerability remediation whilst achieving zero business impact and maintaining 100% coverage across all systems. They successfully addressed this through developing a refined vulnerability remediation process that prioritises issues based on risk assessment, allowing them to maintain continuous system operation.
"Together, we safeguard the continuity of national health programmes." - NEHR-HEALIX Integration Team
3. Health Information Act: Seamlessly connecting healthcare providers to NEHR
The Health Information Act team collaborated to design and develop a comprehensive implementation plan for integrating all healthcare provider systems with NEHR. Their work created a robust, efficient, and secure approach to enable seamless data sharing and access across Singapore's healthcare ecosystem.
Their biggest challenge was onboarding over 200 vendors and more than 5,500 licensees within a limited timeframe using existing resources. However, they successfully achieved this through a phased planning approach that broke down the massive onboarding process into manageable stages. The team conducted detailed data contribution analyses in collaboration with various teams to identify gaps for each source and institution, ensuring comprehensive coverage despite the labour-intensive nature of this task.
“By designing and developing the Health Information Bill leading to enactment (Health information Act), we ensure clinicians have timely, reliable data to support safer care and more informed treatment for patients.” - Health Information Act Team
4. NEHR Private Onboarding: Bridging private and public healthcare data
The NEHR Private Onboarding team integrates private hospital IT systems with NEHR for seamless data sharing and access. This initiative improves continuity of care for patients who visit providers in both private and public healthcare settings by enabling comprehensive patient information access across care environments.
Working closely with private hospitals, the team aligned project plans for each hospital whilst collaborating with MOH to address challenges in technical areas and policy matters. Senior management engagement garnered support for the projects, facilitating faster and smoother onboarding processes. This would ensure data availability in NEHR for healthcare professionals to access, enabling more informed decisions and better patient care delivery.
The team's key challenge involved navigating complex hospital systems with greatly varying workflows across different hospitals. Private hospitals perform many types of services and are required to contribute up to 16 data types, with additional concerns regarding medico-legal liability and contribution of foreigner data as private hospitals may treat foreign VIPs.
The initiative's broader impact centers on benefiting the large volume of patients served by private hospitals whilst motivating other private sector entities to contribute data to NEHR, creating a comprehensive healthcare data ecosystem.
"Together, we bridge private and public healthcare through NEHR.” - NEHR Private Onboarding Team
Behind NEHR's success are dedicated teams who bring technical expertise, collaboration, and unwavering commitment to securing and connecting Singapore's health data. From cybersecurity specialists defending against threats to integration experts bridging public and private healthcare systems, these teams tackle complex challenges to support Singapore's unified health record system.
Stay tuned for more team spotlights!
