Researcher: Making better use of medical data to reduce patient visit frequency
Senior Research Fellow of the Centre for Silver Security (CSS) of the Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics (SKBI) at SMU and Visiting Professor of Economics, Rhema Vaithianathan suggested that Singapore’s healthcare industry could use medical data better to reduce the frequency of hospital visits for patients. She shared how hospitals in New Zealand and America would use a risk prediction model to reduce the frequency of a patient’s visits. She added that Singapore hospitals could use existing medical data to develop preventive measures, so that elderly patients do not need to be hospitalised. For patients who may have frequented hospitals in the past six months, the hospital could arrange for them to receive treatment at the polyclinic to reduce the number of hospital visits. By arranging for a nurse to take care of such patients, the risk of the patient losing the ability to care for himself is reduced.