Embracing data sharing will be key to the success of Healthier SG

THE government’s Healthier SG initiative, unveiled in a White Paper in September and endorsed in Parliament in October, presents a roadmap to reform Singapore’s healthcare system. Central to the proposal is shifting Singapore’s healthcare model towards greater preventive care, empowering more individuals to take charge of their own health.

Singapore’s healthcare system has long been feted as one of the best and most efficient in the world, but with the incidence of chronic diseases still rising, an aging population and ongoing resource crunches within the sector, the need for a major overhaul to rethink how care is delivered is clear. What’s evident too is – the road ahead isn’t going to be easy.

As much as Covid-19 has paved the way for the wider adoption of technologies like remote patient monitoring, personal health tracking and telehealth, which would be key enablers of any national preventive health system, it has also raised questions around data sharing and trust that Singapore’s Ministry of Health will need to tackle to ensure the success of Healthier SG.

Privacy and trust concerns need to be overcome

The good news for policymakers is that Singaporeans themselves are already sold on preventive care, at least in theory. Much of this, in a way, stems from the Covid experience – Philips’ recent “Healthy Living in Asia” survey found that more than 90 per cent of Singaporeans understand the importance of preventive health and many are using personal technologies more than they did pre-pandemic. This means that there is a base level of understanding and willingness about health and preventive care – but monitoring on its own is of limited value if the resulting data is not meaningfully shared with healthcare professionals.

As a first step, Singaporeans need to be sharing the data they collect with their doctors too – yet many aren’t yet doing so. Concerns around data privacy and security are one of the main barriers raised in our survey, as is a lack of knowledge on how to interpret the data and how to share it with doctors and other healthcare professionals.

What’s interesting is that these same issues are echoed by Singapore’s healthcare professionals themselves in our Singapore Future Health Index 2022 report findings, reflecting challenges on both sides of the system. Some 77 per cent of healthcare leaders in Singapore also admit that their staff is overwhelmed by the volume of data available.

A decisive and unified response

Education will be key to breaking the stalemate. For patients, this has to focus first and foremost on the most vulnerable in society, who are typically also the least digitally literate, particularly to avoid a two-speed system that benefits digital natives over more vulnerable groups.

Equally important will be further training for healthcare professionals, and a national curriculum or framework around how data is collected and used, which currently is fragmented at best.

Looking longer term, perhaps the biggest challenge ahead is building an operational framework that truly democratises data by breaking down silos. This will be key to moving towards a model where each patient has a single digital health profile.

Democratising data will also require Singapore’s healthcare industry to align around classification and policies on how more sensitive types of health data (on mental and sexual health, for example) and data on VIPs and “persons of interest”, are handled. A clear framework on these issues, that also builds safeguards into the system to reduce human interference, and resolves questions around data ownership and institutional liability, will be essential to earning public trust.

The road ahead will not be easy, yet if the last three years have shown us anything, it’s that populations and entire healthcare systems can rally together quickly around a common goal when it comes to the crunch. The threat Singaporeans now face from chronic diseases is no less serious than Covid-19, and warrants a decisive, unified approach across the industry and general public.

The writer is country manager of Philips Singapore