Google Cloud, Accenture, and the Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS) a working together to enhance population health, delivery of care, and patient engagement by establishing an agile and advanced architecture, supported by application programming interfaces (APIs), to make data, applications, and services securely and readily available, when and where they are needed.
As the technology agency for Singapore’s public healthcare sector, IHiS has adopted an API-first approach to facilitate data capture across healthcare systems and partners with healthcare providers to deliver analytics tools and mobile applications that are used by healthcare staff and patients.
Under a multi-year agreement, IHiS is tapping Accenture’s expertise to deploy Apigee, Google Cloud’s API management platform, which helps to unlock data and services across the systems managed by IHiS, which can then be accessed by developers to create new applications and capabilities.
The implementation enables IHiS to eliminate data silos and achieve fluid interoperability across Singapore’s healthcare ecosystem.
With Apigee, developers can, for instance, use IHiS’ APIs to build applications and tools – underpinned by integrated workflows and artificial intelligence models – to optimise staff allocation and workload.
One example is the Facial Recognition Automated Visitor Management System (FRAVMS), which has been launched by IHiS and SingHealth to facilitate a smoother and more efficient visitor registration process.
Apigee provided the framework that accelerated FRAVMS’s development, while increasing its scalability, minimizing the need for ongoing maintenance, and future-proofing its integration architecture.
Alan Goh, assistant chief executive at IHiS, said that with Apigee, they can scale their API program with internal developers to deliver more high-quality and digital-first healthcare experiences.
“Together with Google Cloud and Accenture, we can extend secure API gateway access to trusted third party developers, giving patients easier access to their health information and offering deeper insights to inform population health management programs and public health policies,” said Goh.
“Moving forward, IHiS will be exploring the feasibility of adopting commercial cloud API gateways to widen our coverage and promote innovation across Singapore’s healthcare ecosystem,” he added.
To give IHiS full visibility over the use of its APIs, which include validating data flows and ensuring that access is only granted to authorised users, Google Cloud has built security features like encryption key verification, identity brokering, traffic monitoring, and threat and vulnerability detection into the Apigee platform.
