NHG Cares Partners Portal aims to integrate health and social ecosystem

The National Healthcare Group (NHG) and its community partners are optimising the use of aggregated data to achieve an integrated health and social ecosystem in Singapore.

Prior to the launch of NHG Cares Partners Portal, healthcare providers had to manually fill up forms to refer their patients to community partners for aftercare services.

The referral process would also vary across different community partners.

With community care becoming key in Healthier SG, NHG launched the portal in this April to bring together all community programmes in a one-stop digital platform.

Healthier SG is a national initiative by the Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH), and targets to achieve an integrated health and social ecosystem in the country.

Family doctors are now expected to develop a personalised health plan with the patient – incorporating both the patient’s health and social care needs.

The new portal will make it easier for doctors to refer their patients to community care. Aside from NHG's healthcare institutions, the portal will also serve patients and community partners.

This will simplify the referral process for family doctors to connect their patients to community care, centralise programme management for NHG’s community partners, and allow them to issue e-certificates to residents after they complete the programmes.

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Data key to population health

Speaking to GovInsider, NHG’s Chief of Population Health, Ong Jing Fang, explained that MOH’s initiatives, including Healthier SG and Age Well SG, form the bedrock of the group’s investment into the portal.

Under Healthier SG, NHG is designated the regional health manager for Central and North Singapore - tasked to look into community health interventions for patients.

A key benefit of the portal is that it enables real-time reporting and updates.

“We had healthcare utilisation data around the population profile in our regions, and did not want to hold the data only with us”, she said, adding that community partners would benefit from the same data to design the programmes for residents.

Community partner Tsao Foundation’s Community for Successful Ageing (ComSA)’s Assistant Director Mei Amurao added that the aggregated data has enabled her organisation to develop targeted programmes to accommodate different needs of its senior beneficiaries.

The aggregated data from the portal can be filtered based on age groups, gender, geographic area, and other programmes or community partners serving these areas, she explained.

The portal has to-date onboarded 22 community partners and automated about 1,200 programmes across some 100 sites in Central and North Singapore.

Digital trust powered by Healthcare Commercial Cloud

Verifiable credentials platform provider, Accredify, has built the portal on the Healthcare Commercial Cloud (HCC) platform which is managed by national health tech agency, Synapxe.

Accredify’s CEO, Quah Zheng Wei, said that building the portal on HCC has enabled them to achieve both cost-effectiveness and digital trust.

Digital trust refers to the user’s confidence in digital technologies and services, which includes data privacy and security.

Data privacy and security are top notch for sure when we build it on HCC as it is compliant with the rules and regulations of the ministry, he explained.

Accredify had previously embarked on multiple partnerships with other Singapore government agencies, including MOH-issued Covid-19 digital health certificates.

“We can harness true value when we combine digital trust security with data harmonisation... the ability for different parties to communicate with each other, share data and documents in a true-to-source manner,” he added.

Quah highlighted that the ability for agencies to share data with each other, while ensuring users have better data control and ownership, would be key for the healthcare sector to reap the benefits from data analytics.

Accredify also powers the verifiable digital certificates provided to participants of community programmes. Community partners can access an NHG-branded standard template design made available in the portal.

These certificates tap into GovTech Singapore’s OpenAttestation, an open-sourced framework to verify documents using blockchain, said Quah.

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Holistic care means engaging beyond healthcare

NHG’s Ong noted that beyond traditional community partners, NHG is also partnering with other government agencies like the Health Promotion Board (HPB) and National Parks Board (NParks) to onboard their programmes on the portal.

“Health is social. Often, our health really depends on the social environment and the connections we have with other people. Hence, we have gone beyond healthcare [services] to look at other resources,” she explained.

On the possibility of bringing onboard the broader public healthcare sector into the portal, Ong said that NHG is open to new partnerships, whether it is to use the portal or share knowledge among each other.

Similar digital platforms that cater to sub-populations include the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC)’s Integrated Referral Management System (IRMS) for eldercare services, and SG Enable for services related to persons with disabilities.

It’s not always about centralising the services, Ong said, but how the agencies are coordinating in the backend around a patient’s care.

Singapore residents are expecting more seamless service referrals and a better integrated healthcare ecosystem, especially between public and private healthcare providers, GovInsider recently reported. 

Editor's note on 4th Sept: The part about the portal being hosted on Healthcare Cloud (H-Cloud) has been corrected to Healthcare Commercial Cloud (HCC) after clarification with Accredify.