While patients’ length of stay and identification details have long been digitised in the healthcare sector, it was not the case for clinical data. Before the EMR, thick cases of clinical notes were used and handed to the medical records office for entering into the system by non-medically trained staff. Today, the EMR reduces the need for hardcopy notes, while enabling clinicians to input or retrieve real-time, detailed information about patients.

“The fact that we have deployed Sunrise for all of our institutions—from primary care to speciality centres to emergency departments—means that information from various care settings is available to all the users on the same platform. This gives healthcare teams a more holistic view of the patient’s condition,”

Dr. Goh Min Liong
Group Chief Medical Informatics Officer, SingHealth

SingHealth’s EMR platform started with data on clinical investigation
results and over the years, expanded to include information on medications,
procedure reports and patient vital signs. Currently, it also houses all clinical
notes—both historical (scanned) hardcopies as well as those entered directly
into the system by clinicians.

Digitised information from a large set of patients can also be used for
analytics. For example, a good data set can lend itself to endless applications
such as enabling healthcare professionals to study trends and predict
surgery durations to optimise the use of operating theatres, to explore ways
of reducing waiting time at clinics or and even to minimise parking woes for
visitors.