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Creating the Future of Healthcare: A Conversation with Tan Chorh Chuan

26 November 2023

I set up and am currently Chairman of the MOH Office for Healthcare Transformation (MOHT). It was established five years ago to look at more fundamental challenges to our health system, and to work on how we can facilitate and accelerate the transformation of the health system. We chose a number of critical areas in healthcare, such as primary care, where we felt major changes were needed. We focused on scaling: developing capabilities to take ideas that had been shown to be promising and cost effective, and scaling them up to the mainstream system much more quickly.

I am also Chairman of the Healthier SG Implementation Office, which was set up less than two years ago. To deliver a complex multi-stakeholder programme like Healthier SG, we needed a new structure to integrate all the different policy inputs that impinge on delivery, bringing them together in a coherent implementation plan to be carried out. For instance, what takes the most time in Healthier SG is developing the supporting IT system. But for these IT changes to be delivered in time, you first have to confirm the clinical model, clarify the financial mechanisms, and determine the data reporting requirements, and freeze these. This is what I call the policy-policy integration. Then there is the policy-operations interface, which often involves a much wider range of health family and non-health partners. The Implementation Office I chair looks after these aspects of integration, to ensure the effective rollout of the Healthier SG programme.