GovInsider | Smart Gov, by Medha Basu and Nurfilzah Rohaidi, 25 MAY 2017:

Tan Tock Seng Hospital has built an “artificial brain” to help its management, Dr Jamie Lim Chief Operating Officer, reveals exclusively to GovInsider.

AIBMU to automate bed search

The artificial brain “combines all of the expertise and considerations of nursing, medical and operations and comes up with the best recommendation on the bed to be allocated”, Dr Lim explains. “For every admission, we had to go through more than 300 rules,” he adds, such as when to prioritise admissions for critically-ill patients. The AI has “helped to standardise all our admission rules and priorities”.

This has helped free up staff to focus on caregiving work. Only 2 staff are now required per shift to manage 1,700 beds, compared to a team of at least four staff who “relied heavily on manual processes and documentation”, Dr Lim says.

Sotera ViSi Mobile to automate vital signs monitoring

The hospital is also piloting remote monitoring initiatives. Nurses can track the vital signs of elderly patients using sensors, which removes the need to wake them up every four hours to check their blood pressure, for example, Dr Lim explains. “This vital information can be fed into a system, and is able to flag if the perimeters are not in sync with the normal range,” he adds.

SmartSense RTLS to automate inter-department communications

When a patient is admitted, they are tagged with a unique RFID tag that ties to their bed number. “When a patient’s tag is deactivated at the point of discharge, it sends a few other messages: discharge message to the bed management unit; it triggers the bill; and third thing is, it triggers my housekeeping,” Dr Lim explains. This “helps us to ensure that care is delivered at a very high standard and quality.”

source: Exclusive: Tan Tock Seng Hospital builds “artificial brain” to manage services.  Interview with Jamie Lim, COO of Tan Tock Seng Hospital.