Ms Ngiam Siew Ying, CEO, Synapxe
Ms Elsie Tan, Country Leader, Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services Singapore
Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen
It is my pleasure to be at Synapxe’s first HealthX Startup Day, where stakeholders from different parts of healthcare, from technologists to healthcare providers, come together to turn visionary ideas into tangible, innovative solutions. The challenges we face today and tomorrow are complex and multifaceted, from a rapidly ageing population to rising healthcare costs and increasing manpower needs. They demand not just conventional solutions, but a revolution in how we think, act, and care for our people.
2. To confront these challenges head-on, we must invest in continuous innovation, expand our thinking, and explore how technology can empower new models of care, and enable better health for our people, at scale.
Enablers to Help Innovation Thrive in Healthcare
3. The HealthX Startup Day is a next step to bring together innovators and healthcare professionals to understand the real needs and challenges of healthcare providers, and co-develop the most value-generating solutions. Innovators will get the opportunity to pitch to a panel of experts and challenge statement sponsors, and potentially co-develop their solutions with support from the sponsors.
4. In support of the HealthX Startup Day, Synapxe, together with Amazon Web Services (AWS), is launching a co-innovation lab to make prototyping a little easier, by facilitating the building of prototypes on AWS Cloud. Through innovation and cloud workshops, as well as expert guidance from HealthTech specialists, the co-lab will enable innovators to experiment, design and develop their prototype in an agile manner. All innovators, startups and healthcare professionals alike, are welcome to take their first steps with this co-lab.
5. Besides support for prototyping, innovators and their collaborators can also look forward to further experimentation and testing of their prototype, with Synapxe’s HealthX Innovation Sandbox. This will provide an isolated but reflective environment to trial solutions before piloting it in actual healthcare settings. One startup that Synapxe is collaborating with is US2.AI. Their AI-echocardiography solution accelerates access to heart imaging for early diagnosis of heart failure, and enables more efficient management of patients with heart disease. US2.AI will be amongst the first innovative solutions to be deployed in the Innovation Sandbox for product testing, and we look forward to the deployment of more solutions.
Technology to Support New Models of Care
6. With the rapid advancement of technologies, we stand on the cusp of a new era in healthcare, where care can be more accessible and value-based. One innovative solution enabled by technology is Health Discovery, birthed by Synapxe during the pandemic. This remote patient monitoring solution allowed a lean medical team to remotely monitor vital signs of well or asymptomatic COVID-19 patients’ at Community Care Facilities, flagging anomalous readings for intervention. Post pandemic, their agile development team enhanced the solution, now named Health Discovery+, and pivoted it for remote monitoring of chronic disease patients in senior activity centres and polyclinics. Such technology-enabled innovations can help to ease the burden on care teams and improve patients’ access to care.
7. Today, at HealthX Startup Day, we will explore more remote patient monitoring solutions to enable the Mobile Inpatient Care-at-Home (MIC@Home) programme. MIC@Home, an effort across all three Clusters and coordinated by the MOH Office for Healthcare Transformation (MOHT), offers patients the option to be cared for in the comfort of their own home, instead of a hospital ward. Under MIC@Home, patients have round-the-clock access to care delivered by a team of healthcare professionals via teleconsultations, remote patient monitoring and home visits. Importantly, the quality of care is not compromised. We hope to implement more innovative solutions in this area and beyond, through today’s competition.
Closing
8. By embracing and enabling innovation in all its forms, we can find and develop solutions to address our healthcare challenges, and together, build a sustainable and quality healthcare system, and a healthier Singapore.
9. Once again, I would like to congratulate Synapxe and AWS on the launch of their Co-Innovation Lab. I wish everyone here a fruitful HealthX Startup Day. Thank you.