Located in the central region of Singapore, Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH), which is the largest hospital under the National Healthcare Group (NHG), announced that it will be launching a Command, Control and Communications (C3) system to manage resources efficiently, support operational decisions, optimise patient flow and respond effectively to ground situations.

What’s it about

Currently, the C3 system is at pre-production stage at the newly-opened TTSH Operations Command Centre located at the Centre of Health Innovation (CHI), housed at the newly opened Ng Teng Fong Centre for Healthcare Innovation. The first phase will start with streaming data from various operational systems to give a comprehensive overview of a hospital’s operations in real-time, providing operational visibility. 

It will progressively use advanced analytics to generate actionable insights to provide situational sensing so that the hospital can better pre-empt and act in advance of situations before they occur.

The C3 System is set to go live progressively from third quarter 2019 to support daily operations, making TTSH the first Smart Hospital enabled by C3. It will be built on a base infrastructure and will be progressively scaled to the other public hospitals over the next few years. 

Additionally, the C3 System will also be integrated within the Regional Health System to allow a more seamless care experience as patients move across care settings such as from the pre-hospital phase to the acute hospital to the community hospital.

Prior developments to the C3

Before 2008, bed allocation was a very manual process, which relied largely on coordination via pen, paper and phone. Since then, bed allocation in TTSH has evolved, first with the implementation of RFID tagging in TTSH, which allowed the hospital to automate admission and discharge workflows, as well as identify the location of patients in real time.

In 2012, TTSH implemented an algorithm-based decision support bed allocation system, incorporating more than 350 clinical and optimisation rules to ensure that critically ill patients are admitted first, and that the right bed is allocated to the right patient the first time. This helped to reduce overflows, transfers and rework.

On the record

“Much like an airport control tower, the C3 Smart Hospital System is the nerve centre for the hospital. It is a real-time integrator of systems, enabling TTSH to better optimise resources and manage patient flow,” said Mr Gan Kim Yong, Minister for Health, in a statement.