The NUHS PHCC team delivers population programmes focused on preventive care, chronic disease management, and community-based interventions. These services are currently provided through home visits, community health posts (CHP) and virtual consultation. Selected residents who are motivated are enrolled into structured health coaching engagements, targeting conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and lifestyle-related risk factors.

With increasing demand for preventive and community care services, there is a need to enhance current delivery models to improve accessibility, consistency, and scalability across the population.

Key Challenges

The current delivery of health coaching and patient engagement is constrained by a combination of structural, operational, and resource-related challenges. Health coaching is inherently manpower-intensive, requiring repeated one-on-one engagements over extended periods. This limits service capacity and constrains the ability to scale effectively to meet growing population needs.

Accessibility remains limited as services are largely dependent on fixed physical locations and scheduled time slots. This restricts flexibility for patients and creates barriers to timely engagement. Consequently, patients enrolled in structured programmes, particularly for chronic disease management, may not consistently meet planned intervention milestones or receive support when it is most needed.

The patient experience may also be affected by variations in service delivery, as patients may occasionally need to visit different locations to access care due to capacity considerations. This can introduce some discontinuity in care and may impact the consistency of patient engagement over time.

Additionally, patient education is predominantly delivered through static formats, which do not support interactive engagement or personalised learning. This limits patients' ability to clarify queries in real time and may reduce the effectiveness of education in supporting behavioural change.

To address these challenges, the PHCC is seeking innovative digital solutions that can augment existing health coaching resources and deliver accessible, personalised, scalable and continuous engagement beyond physical encounters.

A. Digital Health Coaching

Proposed solutions should enable structured, interactive patient engagement using motivational interviewing techniques to support ongoing health coaching. The solution should facilitate functions such as goal setting (e.g. blood pressure, HbA1c, cholesterol levels, BMI), lifestyle counselling (including diet, exercise, and hydration), and behavioural support to reinforce positive health practices.

The digital avatar is intended to augment, not replace, face-to-face interactions with Health Coaches. By providing residents with 24/7 guided support, it can extend workforce capacity while enabling Health Coaches to focus on residents with higher-touch or more complex needs. For example, in the current Primary Care Network partnership programme to lower HbA1c, residents attend monthly health coaching sessions over 6 months. Depending on each resident’s digital readiness, the avatar could support 2 to 3 of these sessions, reducing the need for all 6 sessions to be conducted face-to-face. Face-to-face sessions can then be prioritised for key touchpoints such as initiation, review or escalation, while avatar-generated summaries are reviewed by the Health Coach on the next working day to maintain oversight, continuity and safety. During health coaching, Health Coaches use Motivational Interviewing techniques and assess the resident’s readiness to change using the Transtheoretical Model. They explore what matters most to the resident, identify clinical, social and other concerns, and support the resident to set S.M.A.R.T. lifestyle modification goals that can be tracked across the six-session coaching journey. Each session concludes with documentation of progress and planning for the next review.

A sample of the documentation template is attached in Annex A (Challenge Statement brief).

Overall, the solution should enhance existing care delivery by augmenting current resources, while maintaining continuity and consistency in patient engagement.

B. Interactive Patient Education

The solution should enhance patient education delivery by enabling more interactive and responsive access to health information. Rather than relying on static formats, it should allow users to engage with content dynamically through query-based or guided interactions.

All responses should be grounded in approved organisational materials and aligned with relevant clinical guidelines and policies. The solution should also support multi-language capabilities to cater to a diverse patient population and improve accessibility.

The intended outcome is to improve patient comprehension, retention of information, and ability to self-manage health conditions effectively.

General Requirements

The solution should meet the following broad requirements:

A. Patient Experience

The solution should provide on-demand access to health coaching and education services across multiple platforms (e.g. mobile, web, and community-based devices), independent of physical location. User interaction should be intuitive and accessible, supporting personalised experiences that take into account individual health status, engagement history, and behavioural context.

B. Content and Safety

All outputs must be based on approved clinical materials, organisational policies and standard operating procedures to ensure accuracy and safety. Clear safeguards should keep responses within approved boundaries and prevent misleading, inappropriate or potentially unsafe information. The solution should integrate with existing institutional content repositories as trusted sources of reference. The solution should support appropriate content governance processes, including the ability for authorised personnel to review, update, approve, and retire coaching and educational content as clinical guidelines, organisational policies, and programme requirements evolve. The solution should provide mechanisms to recognise and appropriately handle out-of-scope, clinical, urgent, or emergency-related queries, including escalation to appropriate healthcare services or care teams where required.

C. Analytics and Monitoring

The solution should provide capabilities to capture and generate insights on usage, engagement, and behavioural trends. It should support mechanisms to identify potential risks, such as disengagement, and enable timely follow-up where required. Functionality to summarise interactions and support downstream workflows is preferred.

The solution should support appropriate human oversight mechanisms, allowing authorised personnel to review interactions, intervene where necessary, provide feedback to improve AI performance, and support governance of patient-facing content and interactions.

In addition, the solution should provide capabilities to monitor AI performance, including response quality, safety incidents, escalation rates, user feedback, and adherence to approved content and safety boundaries.

D. Integration and Patient Context

To support personalised and context-aware health coaching, the solution should be capable of integrating with relevant NUHS systems and digital health platforms, subject to governance and security approvals.

The solution should be able to consume patient-context information, where appropriate, to support tailored coaching interventions and educational recommendations.

Examples may include:

• Demographic information
• Relevant clinical observations, measurements, and health data
• Health screening results
• Patient goals and care plans
• Enrolment in NUHS programmes

The solution should demonstrate the ability to securely exchange data with enterprise healthcare systems using industry-standard integration approaches.

In addition, vendors should articulate their proposed approach to integration with existing NUHS patient engagement platforms, including WhatsApp-based engagement ecosystem: CHAMP.

E. Scalability and Operations

The solution should be designed to operate at scale within the public healthcare environment, supporting large user volumes and concurrent access.

The solution should align with prevailing governance, privacy, cybersecurity, operational, and data protection requirements and support reliable deployment within enterprise healthcare environments.

Vendors should describe their approach to system reliability, monitoring, maintenance, incident management, and business continuity to support sustained operations.

F. Interoperability and Technical Standards

The solution should align with prevailing healthcare interoperability, technology, and data exchange standards to facilitate integration within the NUHS digital health ecosystem.

Vendors should describe their support for relevant standards and frameworks, where applicable, including:

• HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources)
• HL7 messaging standards
• RESTful APIs
• OAuth2 / OpenID Connect, or equivalent authentication standards
• Industry-standard audit logging and monitoring practices

The solution should support a modular, API-driven architecture to enable secure integration with healthcare systems, patient engagement platforms, analytics platforms, and enterprise applications. Preference will be given to solutions that adopt open standards and interoperable architectures to minimise vendor lock-in and support long-term integration within the broader NUHS digital ecosystem.

Where proprietary approaches are utilised, vendors should clearly describe how interoperability, portability, and future integration requirements will be supported.

Intended Outcomes

The solution is expected to improve the overall effectiveness and reach of health coaching and patient education programmes. Specifically, it should expand service coverage without a proportional increase in manpower, improve patient engagement and adherence to health interventions, and enhance patient understanding through more engaging and responsive education.

It should also support the consistent and timely delivery of care, reduce missed intervention milestones, and enable a more proactive, data-driven approach to population health management.

• Download the challenge statement brief in PDF format. Please refer to the PDF here.
• Submit your proposal here. Shortlisted participants will be invited to present their proposals to the assessment panel for further evaluation.  
• Please submit any questions or requests for clarification about the Challenge Statement in writing to healthx@synapxe.sg by 15 Sep 2026, 5pm.
• Responses will be consolidated and published by 18 Sep 2026. Only published responses will be considered official clarifications to the Challenge Statement.
• For additional information, please visit our HealthX Call-for-Innovation FAQ section.