The Student Health Assessment Programme (SHAPE) and Integrated Dental Electronic Assessment for Students (IDEAS) is a mammoth multi-million dollar healthcare project commissioned by Singapore’s Health Promotion Board (HPB), under the Ministry of Health to design and implement a scalable and extensible computerized patient management system.

HPB is chartered to lead national health education, promotion and disease prevention efforts. Under the Preventive Health Services of HPB’s Youth Health Division, the School Health Service and the School Dental Service are responsible to educate and promote good medical and dental health among school students in Singapore through comprehensive school and clinic-based programmes.

HPB needed a robust, scalable and integrated National Student Screening & Referral System to help support and facilitate the ongoing school and clinic-based programmes targeting at 500, 000 students across 300 schools, 1,200 kindergartens and childcare centers nation-wide. There was also a need to interface with a wide range of external government bodies, ministries and education institutions to share and access related data and information to support the health programmes.

Students with identified health and dental programs during the field screening exercise will be referred to the Student Health Centre and the Student Dental Centre at HPB for further assessment and management.

SHAPE & IDEAS is designed and implemented using the Ecquaria Service-Oriented Platform™ (Ecquaria SOP™) as the central application platform which enables HPB’s complex business processes spanning front desk, registration, queue management, clinical, accounting and billing etc. to be accurately mapped into software processes.

Organized around business processes, SHAPE and IDEAS forms a large-scale structured application, which facilitates process tracking, monitoring and change management as well as ease of future maintenance and support. Built with Ecquaria’s Service Covenant™ Framework as the guiding solution philosophy, key stakeholders of the system are enabled to establish Service Covenants (or Service Level Agreements) right at the start of the system build, empowering them to track Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and pre-empt or redress any service degradation across the entire healthcare delivery chain in real-time.

To address the challenge of capturing, storing, accessing and sharing of students’ medical and dental records, Ecquaria SOP™ provides an open standards platform for SHAPE and IDEAS to integrate to disparate and external systems across government, healthcare entities such as Ministry of Education, National Immunization Registry, hospitals and polyclinics, thus allowing SHAPE and IDEAS to interchange and share crucial data.

SHAPE & IDEAS currently manages the electronic medical and dental records of 960,000 patients in Singapore – accessible by more than 400 healthcare users everyday in over 250 medical and dental clinics throughout Singapore everyday via the Singapore Government network and 3G wireless technologies.

Administrators and clinicians now have an easy, seamless and efficient means to capture, store and share some one million medical and dental records in order to diagnose, track and monitor disease conditions among the students - in REAL-TIME.

The project also successfully and seamlessly migrated more than 65 million patient records accumulated over the last 15 years from an aging IBM mainframe to the new enterprise-class JEE Web-based SHAPE & IDEAS system, which helps in the area of data preservation and management.

Launched in 2006, SHAPE and IDEAS is the largest and only integrated healthcare and dental system deployed in Singapore – and in Asia, showcasing best-of-breed real-time patient and case monitoring capabilities.

With the new system in place, HPB is empowered to provide patients dedicated and efficient healthcare services through improved clinical standards, response times and a more accurate diagnosis. In short, overall quality of care is enhanced.

Enabled by dynamic real-time monitoring, tracking features and a business process-oriented solution approach via Ecquaria SOP™, SHAPE and IDEAS epitomizes superior delivery of healthcare and dental care in a life-cycle manner, embracing the concept of Service Covenant™, Process Tracking, Process Monitoring and Proactive Alerts at the start of the healthcare delivery chain.

Healthcare providers (HCP) now have real-time access of clinic data through SHAPE and IDEAS, allowing doctors, nurses and administrators to have collaborated real-time views of clinical parameters, instructions, notes and information. In addition, pre-emptive alerts triggered by the system greatly aid in HCPs’ decision-making leading to a more accurate diagnosis.

Patient registration time is reduced with an increase in overall productivity at HPB through optimal allocation of its manpower and resources.

At a macro level, HPB’s SHAPE and IDEAS contributes to the national initiative of achieving a life-long medical and dental record for Singaporeans (aka One Patient, One Record). SHAPE and IDEAS also contributes to the National Health Data Resources and the National Immunization Registry through its valuable and accurate dental records and the school immunization records respectively.