Driven by the vision to provide thought leadership for future-ready health and well-being systems, the Smart Health Leadership Centre was launched on 20 Nov 2015. Tamsin Greulich-Smith, Member of IT Strategy & Management Practice, charts out what this Centre aims to achieve and the exciting plans ahead.
Singaporeans are living longer than ever before. In 1960, the average Singaporean could expect to live for 65 years. By 2012, this had risen to 82 years of age. We are one of the fastest aging populations in the world and, as our length of life increases, so do our demands on healthcare services.
It is not simply longevity that presents growing challenges in healthcare. As a result of our extended lifetimes and more affluent lifestyles, we are also increasingly likely to become prone to chronic conditions, such as diabetes; Diseases which require ongoing monitoring and management, and which in turn can lead us to suffer from additional disease complications or associated illnesses, such as diabetic retinopathy and coronary heart disease. This requires yet more healthcare attention, from multiple medical practitioners. However, a traditional care model continues prevail in many healthcare facilities, looking at the patient predominantly from an episodic, single disease perspective, and often resulting in unwieldy, inefficient processes with poor patient experiences.
In Singapore, and elsewhere around the world, people are looking for ways to tackle the challenges of caring for populations that are getting older and suffering long-term, complex conditions. The burdens placed on traditional care models are becoming impossible to manage, hence the increasingly pressing need to seek new ways of solving our challenges to meet these evolving healthcare demands.
At NUS-ISS, we believe the answers may be found by harnessing the opportunities arising from new technologies, data analytics, innovation and collaboration. The future experience of healthcare may not, for example, lie solely in the hands of traditional healthcare organisations, but might instead comprise a collaborative, hybrid model of care and wellness, reaching out through multiple channels, crossing specialist boundaries, and allowing care to be managed in very different ways.
On 20th November 2015, NUS-ISS was proud to launch a brand new centre, designed to play a role in driving transformation across Singapore's diverse health ecosystem. The Smart Health Leadership Centre has been established to bring NUS-ISS expertise in leveraging opportunities surrounding technology, data and innovation together with a practitioner's appreciation of industry challenges, to help those working in the health and well-being sector tackle their entrenched problems in new ways.
(From left) Tamsin Greulich-Smith, with Charles Régnier, Vice President & Head of Business Consulting, APAC, Virtusa, and Theresa Lim, CEO & Founder, Play2Lead, at the launch of Smart Health Leadership Centre
Making sense of emerging opportunities, and ideating for greating impact, often benefits from expert inputs and fresh external perspectives. Through tailored training programmes, applied research and mentorship-based consultancy, we aim to provide this expert support. We are excited to be working with partners from public and private sector organisations to explore new opportunities and pilot new ways of working.
Two of our Smart Health partners showcased their efforts to change the way we experience care, during our launch event held at the Novotel Clarke Quay. Mr Rajesh Sukumaran, CEO of Pellucid, a Singapore-based healthcare startup demonstrated the high resolution, cloud-based medical imaging system Pellucid is rolling out across Singapore, as part of an integrated national eye screening programme. Preventing illness through remote screening technologies may help to alleviate some of the pressures facaing acute care providers today, freeing up healthcare facilities for those needing it most.
Mr Dean Tai, CEO of Histoindex, shared an overview of the high precision clinical equipment his startup company has created to improve diagnostic accuracy and support greater patient involvement in health management. The opportunities to redirect care management and more accurately diagnose disease can also help to alleviate pressures within the healthcare system. Singapore has a thriving healthtech startup scene, and we look forward to supporting local firms, such as these, as they seek to impact the health ecosystem in Singapore and beyond. We look forward to sharing our experiences with you as these projects progress.
Fundamental to our new Centre is the creation of a collaborative hub for thought leadership and problem solving. To move forward under the Government's vision of a Smart Nation, we believe it's vital that we come together and partner in ways that we have not considered before if we are to build a truly seamless connected world. Through the Smart Health Leadership Centre, we hope to create an environment to help us realise this vision, for the health benefit of all citizens. This new Centre aims to break the mould for specialist centres, crowdsourcing expertise from diverse pool of stakeholders, stimulating new ways of looking at old problems, and unleashing the potential for true industry impact.
To support this aim, we have created a dedicated Smart Health Community of Practice, to allow common challenges to be explored through the lens of multiple stakeholder perspectives, with the aspiration of generating new insights, and ideas or seeding new collaborations. We hope that you will join us in trying to change the way we all experience health and care into the future.
The first Smart Health Community of Practice Forum takes place on 27 January. Dr Steven Tucker will be sharing his views on "Disrupting traditional medical models for improved health outcomes". For more information or to register, click here.