Singapore's MOH Holdings Wins Enterprise & IT Architecture Excellence Award for its National Electronic Health Records Architecture (NEHRA) initiative

The Asia edition of BioSpectrum reports that Singapore's public healthcare institution, MOH Holdings (MOHH), has won an Enterprise & IT Architecture Excellence Award in the Transformation and Planning category for its National Electronic Health Records Architecture (NEHRA) initiative.

As the national coordinator of healthcare IT in Singapore, MOHH is responsible for creating and managing an enterprise architecture to facilitate IT strategizing, coordination and collaboration among healthcare providers on a national level. While MOHH leads the effort, more than 100 clinicians and IT stakeholders across multiple healthcare institutions and agencies participated in the initiative.

With a vision of "integrated care," the NEHR initiative is transforming the Singapore healthcare system so that regardless of the touch points within the system, healthcare providers have access to relevant patient information. To support this vision, the interoperability across health IT systems is critical to facilitate the sharing of patients' clinical information.

The complexity of the healthcare landscape was the primary reason for using an enterprise architecture as the NEHR initiative will impact multiple organizations and hundreds of systems and processes. Moreover, an enterprise architecture will allow MOHH to have a single coherent blueprint in the long term that includes other national and industry-specific healthcare initiatives.

In an interview with BioSpectrum, Peter Tan, Lead Enterprise Architect, Information Systems Division, MOHH, said, "Few other countries can claim to have architected and implemented a nation-wide electronic health record system. PlanningIT has also facilitated the collaboration with fellow architects in our subsidiary company, Integrated Health Information Systems, to maintain a common and consistent architecture repository that includes information from all stakeholders."