Speech by Minister for Health, Mr Gan Kim Yong, at the Opening Ceremony of the 2nd International Conference on Big Data and Analytics in Healthcare, 23 July 2014

Prof Danny Poo, Chairman of the Organising Committee,

Distinguished speakers, guests,

Ladies and gentlemen,

1.         Good morning to all of you. It gives me great pleasure to welcome all of you, especially our guests from overseas, to Singapore for the 2^nd International Conference on Big Data and Analytics in Healthcare.

2.         This is an excellent platform for thought leaders, key executives and experts in the healthcare sector and health informatics from around the world and the region to exchange their knowledge and share their experience on this subject matter.

3.         Today, citizens want to be better informed on their healthcare needs, so that they can be more involved and be given options to consider their various choices of healthcare services. There is a constant strive for a healthier lifestyle, better care for our elderly and greater assurance that quality healthcare will remain affordable.

4.         Meeting the population’s aspirations and enabling the shifts in clinical landscape to focus more on preventive care as well as right-siting of patients in appropriate care settings are key factors driving the need for big data analytics to provide insights across the healthcare continuum and the various healthcare settings.

5.         Singapore is an early adopter of Information Technology in the provision of governmental services. For the last thirty-five years or so, significant investments have been put into the computerisation and digitisation of services and data, with good outcomes. Healthcare services are increasingly supported with Health Informatics to enable better and more efficient services to enhance patient care. Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) have been deployed in all our hospitals since the early years and national healthcare IT enablement programmes have helped more EMRs to be adopted in more healthcare institutions such as polyclinics, specialist centres, community hospitals and general practitioners. The growing amount of healthcare data collected provides an opportunity for the healthcare sector and industry to leverage on data and analytics to deliver more timely and more effective solutions for patients and care providers.

6.         The availability of Big Data has enabled analytics which can help us to better understand our present population health trends and address issues in a more informed manner. A combination of Lifestyle, Geospatial, Behavioral, Genotype and Sensor data, together with extensive patients’ clinical, social and healthcare data in our IT systems, will further provide us with insights of the health risks of our population and reveal new inter-relationships between data. All these data will be anonymised to preserve privacy. Researchers and data engineers who use the anonymised data will not be able to identify the patients.

7.         We can also gain fresh insights necessary in the delivery of care that is appropriate for the patient and the healthcare ecosystem. This is imperative in optimising our scarce healthcare resources. As we step up our efforts in this area, we can uncover answers to questions such as, “who are those that need help?”, “who are at risk?”, “how can we improve clinical care delivery?”, and “how can we provide sustainable and cost-effective healthcare?”.

8.         However, having big data and analytics on its own will not be sufficient to transform the healthcare system. All stakeholders in the healthcare sector will need to work collaboratively and be supported by a robust health analytics platform to improve health services at the national level.

9.         To leverage healthcare analytics, we would need new skill-sets and competencies. In addition to clinical and Information Technology professionals, we would also need to train more data scientists, industrial engineers and operational researchers in the Healthcare domain. The Centre for Health Informatics (CHI), or CHI, set up in 2012 at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore with support from Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), and MOH Holdings (MOHH) has been providing courses to educate and train IT and Healthcare professionals to better understand Health Informatics, and more importantly, to help them to work better in a healthcare environment that is increasingly dominated by the use of Information Technology. Since 2012, CHI has developed and launched training courses in collaboration with leading overseas higher learning institutes for info-comm and healthcare professionals to acquire relevant healthcare IT skills. CHI has also developed undergraduate and post-graduate level talents for the industry through attachments as well as electives in Health Informatics.

10.       IDA works with the CHI to drive the development of the Health Informatics human capital in Singapore through uniquely designed courses that cover a range of technical disciplines and practical deep dives at the functional level. This includes training courses, research and on-the-job training in collaboration with major healthcare institutions.

11.       Beyond skills and resource capabilities, the Ministry of Health will explore the possibility of providing a robust and secure analytical platform which not only includes the necessary advanced statistical, analytical technology capabilities and services that can accelerate analytical initiatives, but will also sit on top of an IT architecture that can link up data sources from public healthcare institutions, healthcare providers and healthcare partner organisations. This should also allow individuals to contribute data from self-monitoring devices. All these anonymised data from different sources could be made available for analysis and new insights for better patient care could also be discovered. MOH will start the first of a series of pilots next year to test the concept and gain experience in this area.

12.       We hope to create innovative healthcare IT prototypes and solutions in collaboration with industry partners, to reshape the healthcare industry and revolutionise patient care through actionable insights in the years to come. I hope that these initiatives will help to meet our healthcare sector’s goals and also enable Singapore to become a key thought leader in healthcare IT adoption and implementation.

13.       I would like to take this opportunity to thank our healthcare clusters and partners, who have contributed to the development and the implementation of health informatics and healthcare analytics. I look forward to everyone’s continued support and the extensive cross-sectoral collaboration as we synergise our efforts in our journey forward.

14.       This conference is indeed a great opportunity for us to learn from each other, exchange ideas and best practices. I wish all of you a fruitful conference for the next few days. For our friends from overseas, I hope you will also enjoy the sights and the great food in Singapore, but stay away from the casinos.

15.       Thank you.