OPENING ADDRESS BY MR GAN KIM YONG, MINISTER FOR HEALTH, AT THE CENTRE FOR HEALTHCARE INNOVATION “CHI INNOVATE 2019” CONFERENCE

Mdm Kay Kuok, Board Chairman, National Healthcare Group

Prof Philip Choo, Group CEO, National Healthcare Group

Prof Eugene Soh, CEO, Tan Tock Seng Hospital

Ladies and Gentlemen

          Good morning. It is my pleasure to join you for the official opening of the Ng Teng Fong Centre for Healthcare Innovation. This coincides with the third Centre for Healthcare Innovation conference – CHI Innovate 2019. The theme of the conference, “Change Our Future” will inspire our imagination of what the future can be.

2.        In our early years, the focus on public health and basic care helped raise the standards of living in Singapore and improved life expectancy and infant mortality rates. Today, our healthcare system is serving Singaporeans well. Our citizens are living longer, enjoying more healthy years of life, and have access to affordable and good quality healthcare.

3.        But many challenges lie ahead. With rising healthcare demands from an ageing population and slowing local workforce growth, we need to innovate and transform our system to overcome constraints and seek new solutions.

4.        I hope to see CHI play a pivotal role in promoting innovation in healthcare.

Accelerating Innovation through Collaboration

5.        Innovation does not take place in silos, but requires networks, as ideas build on one another. It is critical for our healthcare institutions to collaborate with local and overseas partners, and across institutions. We must capitalise on the collective knowledge and experience of our institutions to co-create new ideas and solutions.

6.        CHI, envisioned as an open innovation centre for promoting thought leadership and workforce transformation, adopts three key pillars to encourage collaboration:

a. Firstly, the CHI Co-Learning Network. Involving all three public healthcare clusters as well as local and overseas strategic partners, the network has grown rapidly to 37 partners, including new ones such as NTUC’s Healthcare Academy, Ribera Salud Healthcare Group from Spain, and the Oxford Centre for Triple Value Healthcare from the United Kingdom.

b. Secondly, the Ng Teng Fong Healthcare Innovation Programme. Established to financially support healthcare innovation projects and training, the programme is funded by $52 million of generous donations from the family of the late Mr Ng Teng Fong. The programme has to date funded 93 projects and collaborations in innovation, and it also sponsors the National Healthcare Innovation & Productivity Medals.

c. Lastly, this exciting new building which I am pleased to officially open today, the Ng Teng Fong Centre for Healthcare Innovation Building. This collaborative space brings CHI’s network partners together physically, as part of the three strategic thrusts for CHI.

Enlarging the Innovation Space

7.        The building is a purpose-built healthcare innovation centre, standing at 9 storeys tall, covering a floor area of 25,000 square metres. I understand that this building adopted a fresh design to incorporate open engagement spaces, innovation labs, and learning studios. The design reflects CHI’s emphasis on people, who, through conversations and collaborations, can develop and implement future models of care, enabled by new technologies.

8.        Beyond enlarging the physical innovation space, I note that CHI will also be expanding the virtual space for innovation and co-learning. With a treasure trove of innovations in different public healthcare institutions, it is important to enable the cross-learning and scaling of these projects across the healthcare system. Supported by the Ministry of Health, Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS), our healthcare clusters and partners, CHI is building a national knowledge management system called the CHI Learning & Development System (CHILD).

9.        CHILD will provide a virtual innovation platform for healthcare institutions, industry players and the academia to brainstorm, co-learn and co-create solutions, while harnessing the collective wisdom of the community. CHILD will also host a live repository of best practices, ongoing projects and innovation tools to support collaboration efforts. By breaking down geographical barriers and institutional constraints, knowledge sharing across healthcare institutions through CHILD will reduce duplicative efforts, and enable faster and better decision-making.

Innovating for Better Operations and Patient Care

10.       Finally, as we innovate and transform, we must keep patients at the centre of our care. By testing new approaches to operations and processes, we have the potential to deliver even better and safer care for our patients, while being more sustainable by optimising the use of our resources.

11.       One example is the newly set up Command, Control & Communications (C3) Smart Hospital System, housed in the new TTSH Operations Command Centre in this building. Much like an airport control tower, the C3 Smart Hospital System is the nerve centre for the hospital. It is a real-time integrator of systems, enabling TTSH to better optimise resources and manage patient flow. The System will go live progressively from the third quarter of this year and it will be scaled up and expanded to other public hospitals at a later stage.

National Healthcare Innovation & Productivity Medals

12.       Beyond innovations at the systems level, our healthcare workforce is at the core of our system. Today, I am delighted to celebrate the exemplary contributions to innovation made by our healthcare teams and individuals. A total of seven projects will be awarded the National Healthcare Innovation and Productivity Medals.

13.       Winning the Excellence Champion Medal this year is the team from the National Healthcare Group Polyclinics (NHGP), with their project “NHGP Teamlet Care Model: A Redesign of Chronic Care Delivery”. The project aims to improve care outcomes of chronic patients by redesigning existing primary care delivery model to provide more comprehensive and proactive patient care under a new “Teamlet” model. Polyclinic patients with more complex conditions are matched to a Teamlet (or care team), comprising two family physicians, a nurse and a care coordinator. Patients will come under the care of the same Teamlet, for each visit. The familiarity with the same “Teamlet” facilitates relationship and trust building between patients and the care teams, and this would improve continuity of care and offer more personalised care.

14.       It is heartening to note that under the Teamlet model, more patients are now taking up preventive health screenings and fewer of them require doctor consultations with better managed chronic conditions. The model has also been adopted by other polyclinics across our healthcare system.

Closing

15.       The transformation of our healthcare ecosystem and workforce is a journey that all of us must take together.

16.       In closing, let me congratulate CHI and its partners on the official opening of the Ng Teng Fong Centre for Healthcare Innovation Building. I am confident that CHI will be a driving force in the transformation of our healthcare system for the future.

17.       I wish you a fruitful learning and sharing experience at this CHI Innovate 2019. Thank you.