Better Healthcare Delivery Needs More Than App Development

Post-COVID-19, healthcare has become one of the fastest industries to adopt digital transformation strategies to prepare for the future and revolutionize medical care. Innovations like AI chatbots, cloud computing, and mobile apps have become indispensable components in healthcare delivery. 

Google Cloud, Accenture, and Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS), a Singaporean healthcare technology firm, announced their collaboration to power the development of data-driven applications for improving healthcare staff productivity, patient care experience, and population health outcomes.

Under a multi-year agreement, IHiS is partnering with Accenture to deploy Apigee, Google Cloud’s API management platform. Apigee helps to unlock data and services across the systems managed by IHiS, which developers can then access to create new applications and capabilities. This eliminates data silos and achieves fluid interoperability across Singapore’s healthcare ecosystem.

“Together with Google Cloud and Accenture, we can extend secure API gateway access to trusted third-party developers, giving patients easier access to their health information and offering deeper insights to inform population health management programs and public health policies,” Alan Goh, IHiS assistant chief executive, explained.

With Apigee, developers can use IHiS’ APIs to build applications and tools — supported by integrated workflows and artificial intelligence models — that optimize staff allocation and workload. APIs allow software systems to quickly exchange information within and across organizational boundaries, reducing the need for duplicated datasets that take up costly enterprise storage space.

For example, the Facial Recognition Automated Visitor Management System (FRAVMS) has been launched by IHiS and SingHealth for a smoother and more efficient visitor registration process. Apigee provided the framework that accelerated FRAVMS’s development while increasing its scalability, minimizing the need for ongoing maintenance, and futureproofing its integration architecture.

Apigee has security features like encryption key verification, identity brokering, traffic monitoring, and threat and vulnerability detection to ensure control over who uses its APIs. It also safeguards patient data in compliance with regulations like Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) and Healthcare Services Act 2020, as well as international standards such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), Health Level 7 (HL7), and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM).

“Our interoperable enterprise blueprint for IHiS, which is based on Apigee, integrates IHiS’ systems, applications, and capabilities under a single strategy – enabling real-time data-driven insights and more agile operations to empower their people and their partners to deliver personalized, efficient, and informed care,” said Ng Wee Wei, Accenture's Southeast Asia Market unit lead and country managing director.

Sherie Ng, Google Cloud Singapore country director, shared, "With Apigee empowering API-led connectivity at scale, IT staff and developers can now focus on upcycling data and helping their organizations overcome staffing shortages, improve transitions between in-patient and out-patient care, and advance preventative care and precision medicine.”

Image credit: iStockphoto/Dilok Klaisataporn