Phase 2 of Roll-out for National Electronic Health Records

Mr Gerald Giam Yean Song asked the Minister for Health (a) what will Phase 2 of the implementation of the National Electronic Health Records (NEHR) system comprise; (b) how much is being budgeted for Phase 2; (c) when will Phase 2 be rolled out; and (d) when

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will the Government's goal of "One Patient, One Health Record" be realised.

Since the NEHR was first rolled out in 2012, we have been progressively enhancing the system and reaching out to user groups. Some of these enhancements include a re-designed user interface and customised care setting views to better support clinical workflows; clinical communications and medication reconciliation pilots to better support care provisioning to patients; data augmentation to expand the breadth of patient-centric information to support decision making and a case management system to better support chronically-ill patients with complex care needs.

Going forward, NEHR will continue to develop new IT functions and provide information to support the integration of care services for the patient across the healthcare sector. This includes the development of the Continuity of Care Record (CCR) functionality which would provide a mechanism for institutions to share patient's active problem list and care plan, with the end state being a seamless integration with hospital EMR systems. Future developments will also include the use of data analytics to support both decision making at the point of care and national planning for MOH.

NEHR will be staged across many years. In the meantime, as our care model continues to evolve to meet emerging challenges and growing healthcare needs, we will need to constantly review our IT system. For this reason, we have developed a Health IT Master Plan, or HITMAP in short, jointly with our public and private sector stakeholders to guide our path forward, including NEHR.

As our IT solutions, including NEHR, will involve procurement exercises, it will not be in our interest at this stage to reveal the overall budget set aside for NEHR.

Patients served by the public sector healthcare institutions already have a single health record shared among our institutions, such as hospitals, SOCs and polyclinics. All community hospitals, 56 community healthcare providers and close to 40% of GP clinics have access to NEHR. MOH is actively working with the remaining private healthcare providers not yet on board to encourage their participation. We urge all our healthcare providers across care settings and especially those in the private and people sectors to support and participate in the NEHR so that we can achieve our vision of "One Patient, One Health Record" as soon as possible.