Here’s how some organisations are leveraging technology to deliver new services and ensure their IT infrastructure can support business needs in a flexible and agile manner.
IHiS adopts an API-first strategy to help enhance healthcare in Singapore
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The Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS) is working with Google Cloud and Accenture to establish an agile and advanced IT architecture that will enhance population health, delivery of care, and patient engagement.
The architecture will be supported by application programming interfaces (APIs), which allow software systems to quickly exchange information within and across organisational boundaries to reduce the need for duplicated datasets that take up costly enterprise storage space. As such, it will facilitate data capture across Singapore’s healthcare systems as well as deliver analytics tools and mobile applications to healthcare staff and patients.
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Under a multi-year agreement, Accenture will help IHiS to deploy Apigee, an API management platform by Google Cloud. Apigee 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.
For instance, Apigee enables developers to use IHiS’s APIs to build applications and tools – underpinned by integrated workflows and artificial intelligence (AI) models — to optimise staff allocation and workload.
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This includes the Facial Recognition Automated Visitor Management System that IHiS and SingHealth launched to facilitate a smoother and more efficient visitor registration process. Apigee provided the framework that accelerated FRAVMS’s development while increasing its scalability, therefore minimising the need for ongoing maintenance, and futureproofing its integration architecture.
“Connectivity and the secured sharing of health data are key enablers of better healthcare for Singaporeans. Apigee provides IHiS with a flexible API-based architecture that serves as the connective tissue across data sources and applications. With Apigee, we can scale our API programme with internal developers to deliver more high-quality and digital-first healthcare experiences,” says IHiS’s assistant chief executive Alan Goh.
He continues: “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 programmes and public health policies. 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.”
The Apigee platform also provides security features — such as encryption key verification, identity brokering, traffic monitoring, and threat and vulnerability detection — to give IHiS full visibility over the use of its APIs.
This will also support the company’s existing efforts to safeguard patient data in compliance with local regulations, like Singapore’s Personal Data Protection, and international standards for exchanging healthcare information electronically, such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources.
Commenting on the partnership, Google Cloud’s country director Sherie Ng says: “A secure-by-design API management platform that standardises data and facilitates information exchange across healthcare systems, services, and applications is becoming just as essential as a stethoscope or an X-ray. With Apigee empowering API-led connectivity at scale, IT staff and developers can now focus on upcycling data and helping their organisations overcome staffing shortages, improve transitions between in-patient and out-patient care, and advance preventative care and precision medicine.
“We look forward to continuing our work with IHiS and Accenture to promote data interoperability and open innovation to the wider healthcare ecosystem. This could then drive new forms of public-private sector collaboration to address other gaps across the care continuum, creating a more efficient and effective healthcare system for all.”
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MSIG Singapore combats motor insurance fraud with advanced AI
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General insurer MSIG Singapore will be using Fermion Merimen’s advanced artificial intelligence tool called TrueSight Fraud Intelligence to combat motor insurance fraud.
According to the General Insurance Association of Singapore, approximately 20% of all incurred motor claims in 2017 were fraudulent. The general insurance sector paid out a total of $1.24 billion in claims across all segments in 2021 too.
The TrueSight Fraud Intelligence tool will check every claim against decision rules to reduce the risk of paying out fraudulent claims. It is expected to automate at least 50% of screening checks, freeing MSIG Singapore’s claims staff to focus on higher-value tasks, such as assessing more complex claims.
“The sheer number of claims processed daily, coupled with their interconnectedness, makes it a huge challenge for insurers to detect fraudulent activities. In the past, it has taken a combination of industry and in-house efforts to uncover fraud. We believe that using a well-designed AI tool will enhance our success in combating fraudulent claims and help to reduce the cost of fraud,” said Sam Tan, senior vice-president and head of Claims Services at MSIG Singapore.
TrueSight Fraud Intelligence augments Fermion Merimen’s popular eClaims management platform. Once data is processed by the eClaims platform, the AI tool makes recommendations by assessing the potential for fraud. Aggregated results of automated checks performed on hundreds of data points are then presented as a visual network diagram, which helps insurers quickly identify scams as they occur.
“Insurers like MSIG with an admirable Kaizen spirit to innovate and serve customers better have inspired us to invest heavily in R&D. It’s our privilege to work closely with MSIG Singapore to pioneer this solution, and now we are looking ahead to roll this solution out to the rest of the industry,” says Sebastian Tan, director of Singapore Operations at Fermion Merimen.
How Trust Bank delivers a three-minute digital account onboarding
Photo: Trust Bank
Getting new customers is no easy feat for digital banks in Singapore, given the city-state’s saturated market. Recognising this, Trust Bank – backed by Standard Chartered and FairPrice Group –partnered with analytics software provider FICO to make fast customer onboarding its differentiator.
“[Thanks to] the ‘refer a friend’ feature in our app, we’ve gone viral, with people sharing their QR codes to get their friends and family to sign up. [Coupling that with our seamless onboarding experience], we’ve managed to get 200,000 customers in about 30 days [after our launch last September],” says Lalit Lohia, Trust Bank’s chief risk officer.
Users simply need to download the Trust Bank mobile app and start the onboarding process, which takes an average of three minutes. They will then get their digital credit card on their phone that can be used immediately or to apply for new financial products.
“In the modern world, it’s not the big that beat the small but it’s the fast that leads. [By working with FICO], we’ve been able to create a really fast, seamless experience in terms of our credit decision-making so that the customers get their card provisioned nearly instantaneously,” states Lohia.
The partnership with FICO also enabled Trust Bank to be agile. Traditionally, it would have taken weeks and months to make changes to a bank’s policies.
However, FICO’s microservices architecture means that the bank can consume the modules it requires, enabling Trust Bank to make policy and strategy changes in hours and days.
“Digital banks are nimble and quick by design. Our partnership with FICO allows us to be responsive to the changes that we need to do. We went cloud-native fairly early on, so we were a step ahead of the market,” claims Lohia.
He continues: “As a CRO, I like the flexibility to be able to make changes really quickly so that we can get the customer that we want to onboard. Additionally, FICO has helped us ensure that all the regulatory requirements are built into our onboarding process. [All of these have led to] many customers deciding to give Trust Bank a try, and it’s been extremely gratifying for us to be well-received in the market.”
