Speeches
SPEECH BY SMS DR JANIL PUTHUCHEARY AT THE NHIC 10TH ANNIVERSARY APPRECIATON DINNER
14 November 2024
Professor Benjamin Ong, Chairman, National Health Innovation Centre Singapore (NHIC) Board Oversight Committee,
Associate Professor Henry Ho, Executive Director, NHIC,
Distinguished guests,
Good evening, everybody. Thank you for inviting me to join you here today. This is an important occasion celebrating the 10th anniversary of the National Health Innovation Centre Singapore (NHIC).
2. This decade of healthcare innovation has been a journey that has played a part in shaping our nation's healthcare landscape. What we are doing today is really quite different from where we were 10 years ago. What NHIC has done has been fundamental and instrumental in that shift. What you have done is to enable the commercialisation of health technologies. You have guided the translation of novel ideas into tangible solutions for clinical practice, and you promoted the adoption of innovations to meet evolving clinical needs. Over the last 10 years, NHIC’s holistic approach to spur a spirit of innovation has catalysed more than 100 innovation projects across our public healthcare institutions (PHIs). This has led to enhanced clinical and healthcare outcomes. This attracted close to $90 million in private sector investments and has led to the development of those innovations into viable solutions.
Accelerating the Translation of Clinical Innovations in Singapore
3. We have an ageing population. We have increasing demand for quality healthcare. These together underscores a need to accelerate the translation of clinical innovations towards impact, precisely the work that you are doing. NHIC has been a key innovation enabler, and served as a key node in our healthcare ecosystem. You work closely with our PHIs to identify and select budding innovations to address unmet clinical needs. You have provided centralised support, funding, strategic guidance, connection to industry partners. NHIC helps to accelerate these clinical innovations towards commercialisation, for healthcare and economic impact.
End-to-End Support to Uplift Promising Innovations
4. Since the inception of NHIC in 2014, the end-to-end support has helped develop promising ideas into real-world solutions. These are brought to market in Singapore and beyond. One example is NHIC’s support to the team at KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH) which started in 2015 through its Joint MedTech grant with SingHealth. This conceptualised a solution for administering spinal anaesthesia accurately to women in labour to reduce post-delivery trauma complications.
5. Building on the initial support, NHIC’s Innovation to Develop (I2D) grant in 2017 enabled that team to develop uSINE® – the world’s first AI-powered ultrasound-guided automated spinal landmark identification system. The technology increases the first-attempt injection success rate from 70 per cent to 92 per cent. It enhances safety during injection of spinal anaesthesia and very importantly, it improves the patient experience. The uSINE® technology has been incorporated as a start-up, HiCura Medical Pte Ltd, which continues to co-develop the technology’s clinical application with KKH, supported by NHIC’s Innovation to Industry (I2I) grant.
6. Currently, it is being implemented in Singapore General Hospital, National Neuroscience Institute, National University Hospital and Tan Tock Seng Hospital, with NHIC’s support from the Innovation to Adopt (I2Adopt) grant as well. HiCura is concurrently expanding its use globally. From May 2023 to September 2024, approximately 20 patients per month benefit from the use of uSINE® at KKH. The numbers are only expected to increase as more and more of our anaesthetists adopt this technology.
7. It is one of the many success stories that has thrived with the support of NHIC. It has evolved from a concept on paper to a solution that enhances patient care.
Support for Systems-Level Healthcare Transformation
8. In the past 10 years, NHIC has primarily focused on supporting innovation projects to build up the culture and environment conducive to health technology development. To better translate the opportunities for innovation into impact, NHIC has also expanded its focus on systems-level transformation in recent years, so as to implement and scale innovations across the whole of our healthcare ecosystem.
9. Which is why in 2022, with the support of the Ministry of Health (MOH), NHIC augmented its support initiatives and rolled out the Clinical Innovation and Adoption Initiative and the I2Adopt grant. This facilitates the test bedding of innovations across multiple healthcare clusters and healthcare settings, accelerates ecosystem-wide adoptions, and improves patient access to new technologies. This is done through public-private partnerships, expediting the development and clinical testing of near market-ready technologies.
10. One notable example is FxMammo, an AI-enabled radiological computer-assisted detection and diagnostic software enhancing the accuracy of mammograms for breast cancer detection. It reduces false positives in initial screenings by 20 per cent, and up to 75 per cent in subsequent screenings, minimising false negatives by more than 38 per cent. All of these improves turnaround time and speeds up patient care and has the potential to improve clinical workflows and ease the workload of our radiologists.
11. FxMammo was developed by teams from the National University of Singapore under the support of the NHIC’s Innovation to Startup (I2Start) grant, in partnership with Enterprise Singapore and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). A start-up company, FathomX, was incorporated and has raised over $2.7 million for commercialisation and market expansion. Today, with the support of NHIC, FxMammo is being trialled as part of a multi-cluster study at Tan Tock Seng Hospital, Sengkang General Hospital, and the National Cancer Centre Singapore. Beyond Singapore, FathomX is scaling the technology globally, to Japan, Europe and North America.
Enhanced Support to the Ecosystem
12. Many good stories. These are only two of the projects that demonstrate the work of the team together with the clinical teams coming together with public-private partnerships. Very importantly, the very rapid movement across a number of institutions across the healthcare ecosystem, a very important outcome in doing your work. So do continue to do more.
13. Today, I am pleased to announce that NHIC will strengthen their support for promising health technologies which are created by or with our clinical community through a pilot grant. NHIC will work with the healthcare clusters to select and resource high-potential projects towards market readiness and clinical deployment. The selected teams can receive up to $1 million in project funding and other support. I look forward to seeing more success stories in our healthcare ecosystem.
NHIC 10th Anniversary Innovation Tributes
14. Here in Singapore, we witnessed numerous promising homegrown clinical innovations. These have elevated the standard of healthcare both within our nation and across the region. This evening, I am glad to present the Rising Star Innovation Tributes to four companies to recognise their outstanding collaborations between our public healthcare institutions and commercial partners.
15. These tributes showcase the enduring partnerships that have contributed to the advancement of healthcare innovations and have delivered on healthcare and economic outcomes, that have led to innovations ranging from less invasive blood-based cancer screening to tech-enabled primary care, precise robotic-assisted surgery, solutions that enhance patient experiences, improve clinical insights, and clinical outcomes, and advance the process of care delivery.
16. Each of these companies, and their partners, exemplify a spirit of innovation and forward-thinking that have improved our healthcare.
Special Tribute to Professor Ranga Krishnan
17. How did we get here? Over the last 10 years, NHIC grew under the visionary leadership of Professor Ranga Krishnan, Chairman of the National Medical Research Council (NMRC) and former Chairman of NHIC. During the establishment of NHIC in 2014, Professor Krishnan played a key role in laying the groundwork and steering the course for long-term success.
18. Drawing on his experience in both clinical practice and academic medicine, Professor Krishnan guided NHIC in accelerating the development and implementation of new technologies at the PHIs for healthcare impact. With his guidance and the support of the former Executive Directors of NHIC, Associate Professor David Epstein and Professor Tina Wong, NHIC established funding programmes for early-stage innovations, forged industry collaborations, created training initiatives for the next generation of clinician innovators.
19. During his tenure of over nine years as the Founding Chairman, Professor Krishnan developed NHIC to be a pillar of Singapore’s healthcare innovation and has contributed significantly to NHIC as an enabler to support ground-up innovations from the clinical community to the healthcare challenges.
20. As we celebrate Professor Krishnan’s contributions, I am confident that under the current leadership of Professor Benjamin Ong and Associate Professor Henry Ho, NHIC will continue to thrive and build upon the many past successes.
Closing
21. Finally, I hope that the MOH family, the Ministry of Health, and the broader healthcare ecosystem can continue working together to build stronger partnerships, including in the form of public-private and multidisciplinary collaborations. We can do more to drive the adoption of healthtech innovations and by doing so, we can achieve better care and better health for Singaporeans, and make these technologies and these products available across the world.
22. In closing, please join me once again in congratulating NHIC for 10 wonderful years and all the tribute recipients. Thank you very much.