Health on the fast-track: How HealthTech is innovating and scaling securely

For the NHG Health's Eye Institute’s Ophthalmic Innovation Lead and Consultant, Assistant Professor Kelvin Li Zhenghao, HealthTech innovation isn’t a luxury – it's an essential enabler for transforming patient care.

Using AWS's secure cloud platform, he partnered with national HealthTech agency Synapxe and the Singapore Institute of Technology to develop Singapore’s first artificial intelligence (AI)-powered visual acuity (VA) system for the public healthcare sector on the HealthX Innovation Sandbox 2.0, launched in May this year.

VA is a routine, high-volume task that involves reading an eye chart from several meters away and tends to place a significant manpower burden on patient service associates (PSAs).

The automated tool developed by Assistant Prof Li aims to be more than just a measurement tool. “We believe that once implemented, an automated VA has the potential to run diagnostics, [and] integrate with healthcare data to better make sense of patient’s conditions,” he said.

The next step, he explains, is integrating the VA test with other ophthalmic data to gain a complete understanding of patients, enabling more proactive and predictive care.

This is just one of the innovations that exemplify broader collaboration efforts underway.

The Sandbox 2.0 is the latest development in a longstanding collaboration between AWS and Synapxe to enable innovations across Singapore’s healthcare sector, said Ms Elsie Tan, AWS’s Worldwide Public Sector Country Manager for Singapore.

The initiative allows public healthcare institutions and industry technology organisations to experiment and scale their innovation projects within a secure, simulated production environment on the Healthcare Commercial Cloud (HCC) — a specialised cloud environment designed for healthcare applications — built on AWS.

Mr Henry Kang, Synapxe’s Director of Innovation Capabilities Enablement (ICE), explained that Sandbox 2.0 builds on the success of its predecessor.

This ensures HealthTech capabilities keep pace with the rapid pace of new technologies, allowing innovators to keep pushing the boundaries for next-generation solutions.

This includes the capability of generating synthetic data for experimentation and enriched replicas of healthcare system APIs.

Combining sandboxing with secure cloud infrastructure

AWS's Tan and Synapxe’s Kang also highlighted how security and regulatory compliance are paramount in healthcare innovation, referencing the HealthX-AWS Co-Innovation Lab.

According to Tan, AWS offers over 300 cloud security tools and enables a highly resilient infrastructure with multiple Availability Zones.

Being built on this foundation allows the HealthX Co-Innovation Lab to offer a secure environment from which healthcare organisations and startups can test solutions on.

She added that globally, AWS has also supported 143 security standards and compliance certifications that fulfill the requirements for every regulatory agency.

Synapxe’s Kang noted that the HealthTech Advisory Centre is a one-stop shop for tech industry partners and healthcare institutions to navigate innovation pathways.

“Through our Cyber Self-Attestation portal which leverages on generative AI, Synapxe also provides industry partners the ability to self-access their compliance with healthcare and cybersecurity policies and enhance their understanding of public healthcare requirements.

In addition to the Co-Innovation Lab and Sandbox 2.0, AWS had also collaborated with Synapxe on HEALIX, the first cloud-based analytics platform for Singapore’s public healthcare sector, to enable secure cloud adoption.

The HEALIX platform “provides faster access to comprehensive de-identified data, reducing costs and manpower needs while accelerating analytics for population health research and a Healthier SG”, AWS’s Tan explained.

To support the capabilities of HEALIX, Synapxe partnered with AWS to develop the consolidated data infrastructure to streamline the operations of this common platform.

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Collaboration begets innovation

Synapxe’s Kang stressed the crucial need for the HealthTech agency to collaborate closely with both healthcare providers and industry partners. This teamwork is necessary to "proactively foster a culture of experimentation and continuous innovation."

To truly capitalise on this culture, it is crucial for people to continuously learn, he said, and added that best practice exchanges allow them to condense years of learning and experience into, for instance, a two-hour conversation.

Ultimately, partnerships, such as through the Co-Innovation Lab, enable the multiplication of value and impact by bringing diverse expertise together, he added.

He explained how the collaboration with AWS has extended the ability for Sandbox 2.0 users to deploy innovative AWS technologies and training programs as well: “We work closely with AWS to ensure that their emerging tech stack will build new capabilities for the entire HealthTech ecosystem, including startups."

Looking ahead, AWS is committed to more efforts to support healthtech innovation in Singapore.

Tan shared that AWS is now working with the National University Health System (NUHS), one of Singapore’s public healthcare clusters, to develop BERTRAND, an agentic AI system that can independently make decisions and take end-to-end healthcare workflow actions.

BERTRAND will leverage the capabilities of RUSSELL-GPT, a secure clinical language model platform built using Amazon Bedrock for healthcare tasks such as drafting referrals and memos, and augments healthcare workflows with multi-agent and automation.