ABOUT NATIONAL ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORD (NEHR)

The National Electronic Health Record (NEHR) is a key enabler of Singapore’s strategic vision for “One Patient, One Health Record” where patients move seamlessly across the national healthcare network, receiving coordinated patient-centric care at the most appropriate settings. It provides secure access to a patient’s summary health record by authorised clinicians and healthcare professionals to:

• Enable greater coordination and informed decision-making,
• Support more accurate diagnosis, better treatment, and patient-centric integrated care.

NEHR is a repository that manages patient’s summary health record centrally by storing clinically relevant information from their encounters with clinicians and healthcare professionals across the national healthcare network throughout their life.

The goal of the NEHR is for patients to enjoy hassle-free healthcare delivery, higher quality of care, fewer duplicate or unnecessary tests and/ or referrals, reduced medical errors and adverse drug events.

To ensure security and confidentiality of patient data while the best care is provided, the NEHR enforces measures to authenticate, authorise and audit healthcare institutions and users' access to patient’s health record.

The NEHR receives and consolidates key health summary (not doctor's notes) from various healthcare institutions and national registries into a holistic health record. It includes information such as:

• Patient demographics
• Admission and visit history
• Discharge summaries
• Laboratory test results
• Radiology results
• Medication history
• History of surgeries or procedures
• Allergies and adverse drug reactions

All public healthcare institutions (restructured hospitals, polyclinics, and speciality centres), some private healthcare institutions (e.g. GPs), community hospitals, nursing homes and government agencies that have requested to participate in the NEHR and were authorised by MOH are able to access to the information in the NEHR. You can find the list of healthcare institutions participating in the NEHR here.

The NEHR is owned by the Ministry of Health of Singapore and managed by Synapxe, Singapore's HealthTech Agency.

Presently, anyone regardless of residency or citizenship status, will have a record in NEHR if he/she has seen an authorised healthcare professional in an institution which contributes data to NEHR.

The NEHR is a central repository which draws information from various contributing source systems and organises them in a summarised form which authorised clinicians and healthcare professionals can access.

There is a set of data requirements for contribution to the NEHR. With the backend system to system integration of the source IT systems to the NEHR, the data transmitted to the NEHR would be the same data entered into the system at source.

Any correction or updating of data would need to be done at contributing source. Data on the NEHR system is date-time stamped so it would be clear when the information was last updated.

While the NEHR serves as an excellent resource for healthcare professionals to support them in patient care, the patient needs to play their part by providing additional information, such as if they are consuming other medication bought from pharmacies or if they sought medical treatment overseas or if treatment was performed by sources not contributing to NEHR.