Singapore's national healthtech agency, Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS) is partnering with Microsoft to develop a secure generative artificial intelligence (AI) solution for healthcare professionals.
Established in 2008, IHiS powers IT systems for some 50 public healthcare institutions, helping over 70,000 healthcare workers.
It is now building the Secure GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) solution using Azure OpenAI Service to enable healthcare workers to generate insights and automate tasks efficiently.
The agency will optimise, automate, and modernise public healthcare IT and security infrastructure at scale to support diverse secure computing needs.
IHiS' chief executive officer, Ngiam Siew Ying, said such intelligent collaboration tools on cloud and AI-powered platforms will deliver greater convenience to clinicians and also enable better focus on patient-centric work.
Several public healthcare entities have already registered for the pilot trial scheduled to kick off in September.
The partners have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to focus on key aspects like improving clinical, and operational insights through Microsoft Azure Intelligent Data Platform and Azure OpenAI Service.
They would also collaborate in the "entire" innovation lifecycle covering ideation, qualification, incubation, development, deployment, scaling and change management to increase adoption.
Use cases
According to IHiS, Secure GPT will help healthcare professionals to summarise medical reports and generate responses to queries on protocols, leverage large language models (LLM) to improve current chatbots and also in knowledge management to gear up cognitive search capability.
For instance, answering queries through the Secure GPT will include “What are the care protocols for diabetes” or “What are the payment subsidy rates” – where summarised information is retrieved from the consolidated source documents in the knowledge base.
"This is different from the typical use of search engines where users have to click through the various search results to get to the information," IHiS said.
In the case of patient medical records, IHiS plans to use Secure GPT to generate condensed patient information from doctors’ clinical notes and laboratory reports in the electronic medical record system, as well as track medication changes and usage.
"This saves time and effort for doctors in reading and digesting numerous and lengthy clinical notes currently."
IHiS and Microsoft had earlier collaborated to deliver better patient and frontline healthcare worker experiences for Singapore.
They had built Health Discovery Plus (HD+) on Azure to help patients take up different vital signs monitoring programs across various settings such as polyclinics, hospitals, and senior activity centres.
As of June 2023, HD+ has supported more than 10,000 patients, collected more than 660,000 vital signs submissions and triggered over 45,000 alerts that prompted clinical interventions.
The other solution - the smart clinician dashboard has helped flag anomalous indicators, enabling pre-defined SMS messages. As a result, a lean healthcare team could track the health of thousands of quarantined patients, minimising the risk of exposure.
