Singapore’s healthcare sector boosts interoperability by releasing two new healthtech standards

Singapore’s drive towards an integrated healthcare system just received a critical technical boost. 

Its national healthtech agency, Synapxe, has released two new national standards designed to improve technology and data interoperability across the sector.  

They are the SS719:2025 Guidelines on Data Standard (Terminology) to Support Interoperability of Healthcare System Records, as well as the SS720:2025 Remote Clinical Monitoring. 

The standards were jointly developed with the Centre of Regulatory Excellence - Standards Development Organisation (CoRESDO) and Enterprise Singapore (EnterpriseSG), through the Singapore Standards Council (SSC). 

The first standard provides guidance on how clinical information should be structured and exchanged between various healthcare systems; while the second standard supports the data integration specifically for remote clinical monitoring devices.

The new standards were announced on Synapxe’s annual HealthX Startup Day on 31 October. 

More importantly, the new standards would be immediately deployed within Synapxe’s HealthX Innovation Sandbox (HX-IS) 2.0, which provides healthtech startups and innovators with a simulated, yet realistic environment to test their solutions. 

By adopting these standards up front, innovators would ensure their medical devices and healthtech solutions seamlessly integrate with electronic medical records, thereby reducing the complexity and high costs of integration.  

Synapxe’s Director of Innovation and Capabilities Enablement (ICE), Henry Kang, said in an official release that by implementing the standards in the sandbox, the agency would "provide the necessary resources for our startups and innovators in the HealthTech ecosystem to build their solutions faster in an interoperable manner.” 

This strategic move around interoperable technology would become a key enabler for Healthier SG, allowing Singapore to deliver the coordinated, patient-centric care vision of its national population health strategy. 

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Singapore's healthcare interoperability challenge 

At the event, Synapxe’s Senior Lead Informatics Specialist, Wong Jing Jing, highlighted that Singapore faces the challenge of fragmented data across public and private healthcare institutions. 

Currently, only around 30 per cent of private healthcare providers are contributing healthcare data to national systems. This issue was further highlighted last month when the Straits Times reported a delay in the timeline for some private hospitals to share their patients’ health records. 

“Singapore actually has a mature healthcare environment with strong digital infrastructure, which provides a great foundation to apply these standards,” she explained.

She highlighted that the first standard was developed to promote data interoperability among both private and public healthcare institutions in Singapore.

Wong added that the standard is also expected to provide the foundation for artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics solutions.

To support out-of-hospital care, the second standard was designed to boost remote clinical monitoring solutions in homes and communities, shares Synapxe’s Assistant Lead Engineer, Software Engineering & Development (SEED)-Engineering Capabilities, Charissa Chua Li-Sien. 

This standard would provide the Application Programming Interface (APIs), which allows patient portals, electronic medical records (EMR) and clinic management systems (CMS) to connect with any remote clinical monitoring device.  

APIs are protocols and tools that allow different software applications to talk to each other. 

The key is to allow the devices to securely create and transmit patient data with other health systems, removing the need for custom coding every time a new system is introduced, Sien explained. 

How such national standards work in practice 

Synapxe's Wong also shared how such standards work in practice by using the General Practitioner (GP) clinic as an example. 

Health data standards are the hidden architecture of integrated care, serving as a common language for healthtech. 

As a GP records each step, every piece of data is simultaneously formatted according to a specific national standard.  

These steps could include logging the patient's demographics, retrieving their medical history from the National Electronic Health Record (NEHR), reviewing lab results, and issuing a medication list. 

This allows the GP to simply "save and submit" with all the complex, coded information seamlessly flowing into the patient’s NEHR, ensuring the data is also shareable across the entire healthcare system. 

The transition to these new standards is a collaborative effort, as Wong pointed out.  

The event acknowledged the public-private partnership efforts of the two working groups behind these standards.

The working groups consisted of members from Ministry of Health (MOH), Synapxe, A*STAR, public healthcare and private healthcare institutions, and healthtech companies. 

EnterpriseSG’s Director-General (Quality and Excellence), Choy Sauw Kook, in an official release, acknowledged that having clear guidelines helps healthcare institutions build trust in new innovations.
 
“Without such standards, we risk creating data silos and disrupting the quality of patient care across different healthcare systems.  

“By implementing these new standards, we can ensure that our digital health infrastructure remains robust and continues to support innovative solutions that address emerging healthcare needs,” she highlighted.