Two private hospitals face linkage delays for national repository

Thomson Medical, Mt Alvernia need more time to align databases to formats required

- Yap Wei Qiang

Not all nine private hospitals in Singapore will contribute their patients' health records to a national repository by the end of 2025 as they had earlier projected.

Two private hospitals Thomson Medical and Mount Alvernia Hospital told The Straits Times that they will face delays, citing challenges in organising the databases in their current electronic medical record systems to align with the formats of the National Electronic Health Record (NEHR).

Introduced in 2011, NEHR serves as a centralised repository for essential health data such as diagnoses, medications, allergies and laboratory reports.

With NEHR, patients do not need to repeat medical tests or take along paper medical reports and scans when visiting different healthcare providers.

A central repository also minimises the risk of patients being prescribed medication they are allergic to.

With the time saved, doctors can make better and faster decisions for their patients.

Public hospitals, which handle 90 per cent of the country's acute hospital workload, have been using NEHR since 2011. Primary care providers such as polyclinics and general practitioner clinics on the Healthier SG initiative have also progressively been on board since then.