The Centre for Healthcare Innovation (CHI), part of Tan Tock Seng Hospital, today held its annual flagship event – CHI Innovate 2022 – with the theme “The Road from Innovation to Impact”.
The CHI Innovate 2022 will discuss how healthcare innovations can be up-sized, re-focused and made more engaging, to deliver better value and impact to the people served.
More than 500 healthcare professionals participated in this year’s CHI Innovate, an annual thought leadership forum by local and overseas healthcare leaders on creating the future of healthcare together.
Urgency for Innovation
Healthcare systems worldwide will continue to face challenges presented by an ageing population, the prevalence of chronic diseases and a tight workforce.
Stressing the need to balance the “Iron Triangle” of healthcare framed by cost, accessibility and quality, the Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for Economic Policies, Heng Swee Keat, underlined the urgency for healthcare institutions to embrace innovation together to tackle the challenges.
The Guest of Honour for the event is Heng Swee Keat, Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for Economic Policies.
Keynote Speaker is Dr Janil Puthucheary, Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Communications & Information and Ministry of Health.
Pursuing Excellence- National HIP
This year, there were nearly 100 submissions for the National Healthcare Innovation and Productivity (HIP) Medals, an award sponsored by the Ng Teng Fong Healthcare Innovation Programme and supported by the Ministry of Health (MOH).
Eight winning projects are recognised for their excellence in Care Redesign, Automation, IT and Robotics Innovation, Workforce Transformation, and Adoption.
The top award – the National HIP Excellence Champion Medal – is presented to Ren Ci Hospital for its smart geo-fencing system that keeps its nursing home residents with dementia safe by alerting staff if they wander outside zoned areas.
Residents are empowered to move about independently and safely with minimal supervision.
Accelerating Innovation – CHISEL
CHISEL, a sandbox and marketplace supported by Temasek Foundation and MOH, aims to accelerate the adoption of healthcare innovations jointly developed with start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises for patients.
It has been gaining much interest, with over 200 proposals received to date.
Of these, nine solutions have gone through a robust assessment by Public Healthcare Institutions and will soon be test-bedded at various public healthcare premises.
Amongst the successful proposals accepted are:
1. H-Man, Singapore’s first-of-its-kind portable medical artificial intelligence robot to help patients undergo upper limb rehabilitation therapy at home.
Co-developed by Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH), Nanyang Technological University and ArtiCares Pte Ltd, H-Man makes home rehabilitation more engaging and convenient and allows patients’ performance and feedback to be sent to therapists wirelessly.
The project is now entering its second phase with a pilot study to enhance H-Man into a potential tele-rehabilitation service for stroke patients to do home rehabilitation exercises safely with remote supervision.
2. PreSAGE, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered bed-fall surveillance and prevention prediction system, is co-developed by TTSH and CoNEX Healthcare Pte Ltd.
It uses thermal sensing to provide round-the-clock automated surveillance, allowing timely interventions by healthcare staff for safer patient care.
The project has been successfully trialled in TTSH wards and will soon be tested in community care settings and residential homes.
Reimagining Healthcare – CHIRP
CHI Reimagination Plaza (CHIRP) is a shared space for reimagining new sustainable models of care.
Here, the mission is to tap digitalisation and technologies to create a Hospital without Walls, an ideology for the right and best care to be administered anywhere, anytime.
Some of the ideas discussed are:
1. CHI Evaluation Framework (CHIEF) is an evaluation metric framework developed by CHI in consultation with public healthcare clusters for shared understanding, assessment and application.This common framework ensures robust quality and scalability checks so that innovations can be smoothly transited and adopted in various care settings.
For a start, CHIEF was used to assess the feasibility of the nine innovative solutions by start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises under CHISEL.
2. Healthcare 5G, a concerted exploration of 5G applications in healthcare by CHI and Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), starting with a 5G Use Case Workshop with TTSH to understand the demands within healthcare and how the sector will benefit from the implementation of 5G.
One example would be the study of an existing pill delivery robot, the Pillbot, at TTSH.
Currently, the innovation is limited to delivering medications with a teleconferencing feature to patients in the Emergency Department’s high-risk zones.
With a 5G Network, the robot can potentially host multi-channel conferencing capabilities scaled up for bedside care in the wards and augment manpower in other hospital operations such as security and portering.
With a vibrant innovation community of partners at its core, CHIRP is set for an upgrade to transform its existing co-creating space to leverage virtual reality technologies to create an experiential physical-virtual hybrid concept.
Collaborators can look forward to an immersive learning experience to test their innovation in simulated care environments of the future.
A Joint Venture into Medical 3D Printing
Assimilating seamlessly into the ecosystem of Digitalisation, TTSH’s Medical 3D Printing Centre now calls CHI its new home.
Officially launched today (4 November 2022), the centre currently houses seven machines to meet the increasing demand and popularity of 3D-printed technology for healthcare applications.
Towards CHI INNOVATE 2023
With care going beyond hospital walls with digitalisation, save the date for CHI INNOVATE 2023, which will take place on 28 July 2023.
Themed “Health and Social Change for Sustainability”, the annual flagship event will bring together global thought leaders from across industries to engage with healthcare professionals in Singapore and beyond.
The centre has printed over 200 3D models for clinical, educational and research purposes.
Together with its industry partners, Eye-2-Eye Communications Pte Ltd, Medairum Pte Ltd and NHG’s Centre for Medical Technologies & Innovations (CMTi), the centre will continue to leverage each other’s expertise to scale up and expand its capabilities to other clinical specialities and research to benefit even more medical professionals and patients within the hospital and the community.
The patient-specific and customised anatomical models make it easier for patients to understand their medical conditions.
They also enable surgeons to practise and plan their surgeries beforehand, saving precious intra-operative time and helping surgeons achieve more precise and efficient clinical outcomes.
Tags: CHI, conferences, events, healthcare, healthtech, innovation, MedTech, Singapore, TTSH