Ngiam Siew Ying, CEO, Synapxe, Singapore

1. How do you use technology/policy to improve citizens’ lives? Tell us about your role or organisation. 

Synapxe sits at the crossroads of health and technology. This puts us in a unique position to challenge the traditional notion of care and inspire tomorrow’s health.

As CEO, my role is to guide our vision and strategy for leveraging technology to improve lives. At our core, we are about using technology to make healthcare more accessible, efficient, and patient-centric.

We also recognise that this isn’t a journey we take alone. Collaboration with healthcare and industry partners is critical. By working closely together, we combine the expertise, insights, and resources needed to co-create solutions that truly address the needs of patients and caregivers.

While technology is the enabler, it’s the human impact that defines our success.

To subscribe to the GovInsider bulletin click here.

2. What was the most impactful project you worked on this year? 

In July, we completed the rollout of the Next Generation Electronic Medical Record (NGEMR) system across two public healthcare clusters – National University Health System (NUHS) and National Healthcare Group (NHG). This brings us one step closer to the vision of having a single medical records platform for the entire public healthcare.

With this project, detailed records of a patient’s health journey, including the doctor’s medical notes, follows the patient across facilities and clusters. For the healthcare provider, it is better care coordination, decision support, and data quality for advanced analytics; for the patient, it is a seamless experience across care settings. This is a leap forward in how healthcare is delivered and experienced.

But what makes this project truly impactful is the people behind it. It is teamwork on an extraordinary scale – healthcare professionals, IT specialists, and operational teams coming together, united by a shared purpose, navigating complexities and turning challenges into opportunities.

3. What was one unexpected learning from 2024? 

If I had to choose just one, it would be this: Take your responsibilities seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously. I often share this with my teams and new hires.

Success and failure are two sides of the same coin, and neither should define us. Success can blind us to opportunities for growth, while failure can weigh us down if we let it.

In HealthTech, we face challenges that demand precision, focus, and accountability. There’s simply no room for cutting corners. But alongside it, I’ve learnt humility and humor. Staying grounded, embracing setbacks as lessons, and being brave to laugh – even at ourselves – make us stronger. That’s how we keep moving forward.

4. What’s a tool or technique you’re excited to explore in 2025? 

With the opening of our new office at Elementum this year, we took the opportunity to change the way we do things and do them better. One of which was to bring our monitoring, responses, and remediation capabilities under one roof into our Healthcare Integrated Operations (HITOps) Centre. It enhances the situational awareness of different operation teams, leading to quicker responses and resolutions during incidents. With this, we now have the potential to rewrite the story of healthtech resilience.

What excites me is what HITOps means for the years ahead – unified observability that is powered by machine learning to enable earlier incident detection for prevention and faster recovery, with more consistent results.

We envision it to be the heartbeat for a smarter, more agile healthcare system – one that doesn’t just respond to the unexpected but stays many steps ahead of it. It is a bold step we need, to lead the way to inspiring tomorrow’s health.

To subscribe to the GovInsider bulletin click here.

5. Everybody’s talking about AI today – give us your hot take on AI and what it means for the public sector.

We need to discern true value from hype when it comes to AI. AI has the potential to be a game changer, but only if we use it wisely. Traditional AI or deterministic models is still the main workhorse; and they can be made more powerful when carefully applied in combination with GenAI or LLMs.

AI can be a formidable transformative force in a few areas: One, to reduce toil so clinicians spend more time with patients instead of their computers. Speech-to-text capabilities, for example, will come in useful.

Two, to improve capabilities. AI algorithms pick up features in images that are easily missed by the human eye. Digital imaging and pathology will help our limited number of radiologists and pathologists cover more ground more quickly and accurately.

Three, to secure our systems better. We must up our defenses and monitoring against adversaries who are increasingly using AI.

One up and coming trend is Agentic AI, which are artificial intelligence systems that can perform tasks with minimal human intervention. It potentially changes the way we make decisions by accelerating processes and enhancing coordination, leading to improved outcomes across large-scale systems. More needs to be understood how this works and can be applied well, hence we are studying this trend.

We are living in a pivotal moment of the AI revolution. It has the potential to make healthcare more adaptive and personalised, improving the quality of care we provide. We must therefore be relentless in learning and innovating.

6. What are your priorities for 2025? 

We continue to prioritise a few things that were set in motion this year: One, our commitment to build a central digital health information grid for patient medical records, ensuring seamless access to critical data that empowers both patients and providers.

Two, we will continue to innovate systems for premise-neutral healthcare and financing, making healthcare more adaptive and personalised through AI.

We are also excited to unlock future possibilities especially in the convergence of genomics, AI, and the focus on preventive care. We will be doing this through strategic partnerships and a relentless focus on learning and innovation.

And across these priorities are a few constants: ensuring the highest standards of cyber and data security to preserve public trust, and delivering solutions that are sustainable and cost efficient.

7. What advice do you have for public sector innovators? 

Two things come to mind:

• Know when the frame has shifted.

Technology is moving at such a fast pace that the correct answers a few years ago, may no longer be correct today. It is therefore important to look at the environment and trends, and recognise where the frames have shifted. Security is a good example of how threats continue to evolve. Even phishing attempts are getting more elaborate with AI; attackers are leveraging AI capabilities to lower “barriers to entry”. We need to review our solutions regularly, as things move too quickly for us to afford complacency.

• Be obsessed with value.

It is easy to be caught up by hype and what the market is talking about. But we have always to understand the intrinsic true value of anything we set out to do. In healthcare, resources are limited and lives are at stake. Innovative solutions must have the ability to preserve the primacy of patient safety and value actualisation at every step of the way.

8. Who inspires you today? 

I’m surrounded by incredible minds with deep expertise across a range of fields – from consumer digital app development and software engineering to cyber forensics and enterprise architecture. Their hunger for learning and drive to solve the most complex challenges inspires me.

I am not a techie as others define it, as I am a civil engineer by training. I won’t know tech to the detail a tech person will. I know it from strategy. While strategy sets the direction, it’s the people who understand the tech and transform it into useful tools that drive us forward and fuel our mission.

I seek their counsel and wisdom; conversations with them stretch my understanding. I count my blessings to stand alongside the tech experts around me, to learn from them, and to be reminded that leadership isn’t about knowing everything – it’s about embracing the power of learning, together.

This feature was made possible in partnership with Synapxe.