Page 39 - Implementing ITU-T International Standards to Shape Smart Sustainable Cities: The Case of Singapore

Implementing ITU-T International Standards to Shape Smart Sustainable Cities –
The Case of Singapore

Smart Health Video Consultation was designed for various health care uses and settings, with
high-quality video and audio for more accurate assessment of patients’ conditions, and features
such as multi-party video conferencing for consultation with multi-disciplinary care teams,
annotation, file sharing and display of medical reports or images for reference during the
consultation. This also enables our health-care teams to monitor patients more regularly than
in traditional face-to-face appointments, which helps clinicians to deliver better care and
improved health to the population.
Implemented in phases from November 2016, Smart Health Video Consultation is used in areas
such as follow-up services for paediatric eczema pharmacy consultation, paediatric home-care
services, lactation consultation, and speech therapy. It is also used for post-stroke,
communicable disease, cancer patient care, mental health, geriatrics, community nursing and
other conditions that do not require physical examination.

Figure 10 – Smart Health TeleRehab

Patients can enjoy greater convenience and access to rehabilitation therapy services with Smart
Health TeleRehab, which was progressively rolled out from February 2017. Through wearable
sensors and videos, patients can undergo prescribed rehabilitation exercises at a time and place
of their choice. Easy to set up, the system detects and measures motor movements with sensors
and algorithms. This enables immediate feedback to be given to patients about whether they
are performing the exercises correctly. A video conferencing feature is available to enable
patients to consult therapists remotely. Therapists are able to review their patients’ progress
asynchronously via smart dashboards. Therapists and therapy service providers will benefit from
the productivity improvements.

In late 2017, Smart Health Vital Signs Monitoring will be rolled out enabling health-care
providers will be able to monitor patients’ vital signs at home or in the community. Importantly,
this will enable more targeted and timely intervention for patients on post-discharge
management and chronic disease management programmes.

Singapore introduced the National Electronic Health Record (NEHR) in 2013 as a key enabler to
realise the “One Patient, One Health Record” vision. It enables authorised health-care
professionals to view a patient’s health-care history across Singapore’s health ecosystem. Access
to crucial clinical information helps health-care professionals make better informed decisions to
enhance care delivery for patients and minimises duplicative tests. During medical emergencies,
it could also save lives. For patients, selected information from the NEHR is available on
HealthHub to empower them to manage their health better.

29