SPEECH BY DR JANIL PUTHUCHEARY, SENIOR MINISTER OF STATE, MINISTRY OF HEALTH, AT SYNAPXE HEALTHX STARTUP DAY ON 19 SEPTEMBER 2023, 9.10AM

Ms Ngiam Siew Ying, CEO, Synapxe

Ms Elsie Tan, Country Leader, Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services Singapore

Guests, ladies and gentlemen

2.              It is a real pleasure to see days and collaborations like this happen. Thank you very much for inviting me to join you at the first HealthX Startup Day. Today is about bringing together stakeholders across the spectrum of healthcare, together with technologists, healthcare providers. We hope to be able to give the platform and the opportunity for startups to turn ideas into tangible and innovative solutions.

3.              The challenges that we face today in healthcare are complex and multi-faceted. Things like a rapidly aging population, rising healthcare costs and increasing manpower needs. They are all coming together at the same time. So conventional solutions or “just do more” is not going to help us. We need to have not just conventional solutions, but a transformative approach on how we think and how we act from using technology.

4.              To deal with this, we have to invest in innovation. We have to expand our thinking, we have to explore how technology can empower and enable new models of care to ultimately result in better health.

Enablers to Help Innovation Thrive in Healthcare

5.              The HealthX Startup Day is the next step in bringing together innovators and healthcare professionals, and to have both sides understand the very real needs and challenges, especially for healthcare providers, and together co-develop the most value generating solutions. Innovators will get the opportunity to pitch to a panel of experts, challenge statements sponsors and potentially co-develop their solutions with support from these sponsors.

6.              In support of the HealthX Startup Day – Synapse together with Amazon Web Services is launching a co-innovation lab. The idea is to make prototyping a little easier. Prototyping cannot be easy but there are things that we can do to make it a little easier. That's what the co-innovation laboratory is trying to do and facilitating the building of those prototypes on AWS cloud.

7.              Through workshops, through partnerships with expert guidance from the HealthTech specialists, this laboratory will enable you to experiment, design and develop prototypes in an agile manner. And all innovators, healthcare professionals, people interested in startups in this space are welcome to take these first steps in the co-lab.

8.              Besides support for prototyping, you can also look forward to experimenting and testing your prototype with Synapxe’s HealthX Innovation Sandbox. The Sandbox is there to provide an isolated but reflective environment of the potential conditions present when the product is deployed, and trial the solutions before piloting in an actual healthcare setting.

9.              One startup that Synapxe is collaborating with is US2.AI. They have an AI echocardiography solution which accelerates access to heart imaging for early diagnosis of heart failure, and enables a more efficient management of patients with heart disease. US2.AI  will be among the first solutions deployed within the Innovation Sandbox for testing and we look forward to deployment of more solutions.

Technology to Support New Models of Care

10.           With the rapid advancement of technologies, you can argue that we are on the cusp of a new era of healthcare. Certainly very exciting technologies, very exciting confluence of experiments and ideas from different branches of science. But ultimately what we do with the technology in the healthcare space has to make healthcare more accessible and provide more value for patients, families and our society.

11.           One solution enabled by technology was Health Discovery, birthed by Synapxe during the pandemic, like many things that happened during the pandemic. But this remote patient monitoring solution allowed a very lean medical team to remotely monitor vital signs of well or asymptomatic COVID-19 patients at the Community Care facilities. This would flag anomalous readings for intervention.

12.           COVID-19 seems a little bit like a fever dream or hallucination. But it was real, and the challenges that we faced in COVID-19 - having to do much more in healthcare but with less manpower. All of our manpower was soaked up running the COVID-19 ICUs, and on the frontlines.  Having to do much more in the healthcare space but with less manpower. It was a compressed taste of what we are needed to do in healthcare. It gave us in three years, a very quick idea of what the next 15 to 20 years would be. Thankfully, we have had that taste.

13.           Many people were driven to very innovative solutions. We must learn those lessons, institutionalise those lessons, and then prepare for this permanent change in our landscape as a result of our ageing population, shifting demographics, our manpower availability, and increasing healthcare needs. But this is happening at a time when what we can do with technology is increasing very rapidly.

14.           So things like this remote patient monitoring – you got a large number of patients to look after, and a very small medical team that is available – not being deployed at COVID-19 ICUs - how can technology multiply that skill and make possible a very new set of solutions?

15.           We have never had Community Care Facilities before but ultimately very necessary in our COVID-19 fight. We came up with it and it was technology-enabled. Post-pandemic, their agile development team enhanced the solution which is now called Health Discovery+. The team pivoted the technology to remote monitoring of chronic disease patients in senior activity centres and polyclinics. Learning those lessons, taking the technology and applying to our current use case.

16.           These types of technologies are very important. How do we ease the burden of care on the care teams, how do we improve patients’ access to care, how do we use technology as a multiplier of very human skills. That is what we are here for today. We hope that the HealthX Startup Day will explore more remote patient monitoring solutions including those which enabled the Mobile Inpatient Care-at-Home (MIC@Home) programme.

17.           This is an important effort across all three healthcare clusters, co-ordinated by the MOH Office for Healthcare Transformation. We are offering patients the option to be cared for in the comfort of their own home instead of a hospital ward. It is not like the COVID-19 Community Care Facilities. Those patients are already recovering. Here are patients requiring treatment that ordinarily in the past would have required a team.  Now can we find ways to safely and effectively do this at home? That is what the MIC@Home programme is all about.

18.           Under this programme, patients have round-the-clock access to care delivered by a team of healthcare professionals, through teleconsultations, remote patient monitoring and home visits. You can see that all three components need technology support. Even a home visit needs technology support. How do you work out the appropriate scheduling, how do you bring all the information with you, how you conduct the transactions when you are on site. Every step of the journey is only possible and effective when you have the right technology support. So we hope to use these types of solutions and make sure that the quality of care is not compromised, give increasing access to healthcare to our patients or clients.

19.           We hope to implement more solutions in this area and beyond through efforts like today. We can find and develop solutions to address our healthcare challenges. We can, we have to, and our track record suggests we can do so. Together, we can build a sustainable and quality healthcare system and ultimately, a healthier Singapore.

20.           Congratulations again to Synapxe and AWS for the launch of the co-innovation lab. I wish everyone here a very fruitful HealthX Startup Day. I look forward to hearing about your pitches, reading about the progress and development of your products over time and ultimately becoming a beneficiary as a patient when I need healthcare myself.