Ecquaria Steps Up Preventive Medicine with Award-Winning Integrated Primary Healthcare IT Solutions for Singapore

Empowering patients, healthcare providers and stakeholders by enabling real-time, collaborated communication for proactive healthcare management

Singapore (16 May 2007) - Enhancing preventive healthcare through innovative use of technology that proactively tracks and monitors critical points of care across the healthcare service delivery is the combined winning IT healthcare formula for Ecquaria and their customer, the Singapore Health Promotion Board (HPB), Singapore's national agency for health promotion and disease prevention. This has been proven going by their recent industry accolades in bagging the Top Healthcare Award¹ and Merit Award respectively at the prestigious Asia Pacific Infocomm Technology Awards 2006 (APICTA) in Macau and the National Infocomm Awards 2006 (NIA) in Singapore last year.

Ecquaria Technologies (www.ecquaria.com), leader in the provision of mission-critical government and enterprise infrastructures and solutions, has been a long standing technology partner of HPB in developing and implementing key mission-critical primary IT healthcare management systems and solutions powered by its award-winning² flagship product, the Ecquaria Service-Oriented Platform™ (Ecquaria SOP™), in support of HPB’s national preventive healthcare and disease management programmes.

Ecquaria SOP™ is a standards-based service-oriented architecture harnessing a process-oriented framework, which serves as a central IT backbone for HPB that aligns its complex healthcare business and IT processes for improved clinical governance. The Platform enables seamless collaboration between doctors, patients and people involved in all points of care spanning the front desk, registration, queue management, clinical, accounting and billing in support of its critical outpatient and clinical information systems.

"Preventive medicine is all about early detection of diseases leading to early diagnosis and treatment for patients," said Dr Foong Wai Keong, President and Chief Executive Officer, Ecquaria. "In the same way, Ecquaria healthcare solutions based on Ecquaria SOP™ technology are designed to bring to patients, clinicians and stakeholders in the healthcare service delivery chain the collaborative power to communicate, detect and pre-empt any process or service lapses and bottlenecks. This is done through its inherent real-time Key Performance Indicator intelligence and monitoring capabilities."

Last year, Ecquaria successfully launched "SHAPE and IDEAS" , an integrated patient-centric clinical management system built on Ecquaria SOPTM for the management and administering of student healthcare for both medical and dental services. Commissioned by HPB, the award-winning mission-critical healthcare project marked HPB’s commitment towards 'One Patient, One Electronic Medical Record'. The project is regarded as arguably Asia's largest and only real-time integrated system that links over one million student medical and dental records nationwide.

Ecquaria also successfully implemented two key systems, namely the Breast Cancer Screening ("BSS") and Cervical Cancer ("CSS") Systems to provide screening services to over one million females above 25 years of age as part of HPB's national screening program launch aimed to combat these two common cancers among women in Singapore.

IT for healthcare has proven its benefits as a strategic enabler in meeting the integrated needs of healthcare providers and patients. Said Mr Lam Pin Woon, Chief Executive Officer, Health Promotion Board, "SHAPE and IDEAS manages about one million medical, vision and dental screening records and captures 300, 000 immunization records annually. It has radically improved clinical care and customer service as well as our front desk services, resulting in 50% savings in patient registration time."

Ecquaria has been a pioneering technology partner with the Singapore Government in shaping and enriching the lives of Singaporeans since the development of the Singapore Public Service Infrastructure, which hosts over 2,000 public e-services including healthcare services.

"Through our healthcare project successes, we are proud to contribute towards the national initiative of achieving a lifelong medical and dental electronic record for Singaporeans. We are continuously striving to bring innovative solutions through IT by setting a new benchmark for quality healthcare service delivery that truly delights management, clinicians and patients at the end of the day," Dr Foong added.

Ecquaria Healthcare IT solutions SHAPE and IDEAS and Breast and Cervical Cancer Screening is being showcased under the theme of "Preventive Medicine: Your Best IT Healthcare" at the first Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) AsiaPac 2007 conference held in Singapore.

The HIMSS AsiaPac 2007 conference and exhibition officially opened today and ends May 18. Over 50 industry thought leaders from across the globe, including Malaysia, China, Australia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand and the United States, will be speaking on various industry issues and sharing case studies. About 1,000 industry professionals and policymakers are expected to attend.

¹ HPB’s Student Health Assessment Programme (SHAPE) and Integrated Dental Electronic Assessment for Students (IDEAS) project won two major awards in 2006. It won the top award for healthcare at the Asia Pacific Infocomm Technology Awards (APICTA) 2006 in Macau and was honoured in the Top 3 “Most Innovative Use of Infocomm Technology (Public Sector)” category at the National Infocomm Awards 2006,

² Ecquaria Service-Oriented Platform™ was honoured as the Top 5 “Most Innovative Infocomm Product” category at the National Infocomm Awards 2006, the highest industry accolade for excellence in infocomm innovation in Singapore.

³ Please refer to Notes to Editor below.

Notes to Editor:

About SHAPE and IDEAS

Student Health Assessment Programme (SHAPE) and Integrated Dental Electronic Assessment for Students (IDEAS) is a scalable and integrated patient-centric clinical management system for the medical and dental services provided by HPB. It serves as the main repository for school-based and clinic-based data. It is a large and complex service-oriented healthcare IT system, showcasing the best of breed real-time patient and case monitoring capabilities. SHAPE and IDEAS harnesses the power of Ecquaria Technologies’ flagship product, the Ecquaria Service-Oriented Platform™ (Ecquaria SOP™) as the infrastructure that provides the business-friendly and process-oriented approach in the system

The system allows real-time accessing and capturing of student records by more than 600 clinicians and field staff of HPB who are situated island wide in more than 200 locations. Access to the system is through school and government networks and for some, through 3G wireless networks. The system is also plugged into the national Electronic Medical Records Exchange (EMRX), to enable seamless sharing of clinic attendance information with healthcare providers in the public healthcare sector during patient visits.

The heart of the system is the ability to intelligently trigger off appropriate dedicated clinical care plans and workflows based on the Reason for Referral. The use of structured care plans, odontogram charting, treatment planning and treatment execution have facilitated data capture and provides a useful guided clinical approach to the management of the patient with the aim of enhancing clinical standards and quality of care for the patient. The design of these care plans and odontograms also facilitates the capture of structured data for analysis and research.

Real-time sharing of information among the various service stations, clinics and operatories, ready online retrieval of historical health information about students from the system, and an integrated appointment scheduling and queue management system have reduced dependencies on paper case records, improved waiting and consultation times and enhanced overall patient experience.

About Ecquaria Technologies

Ecquaria is a leading government and enterprise business platform provider that powers high-volume, business-critical government, healthcare, education, financial services and leisure applications for customers worldwide. The company’s flagship product is the Ecquaria Service-Oriented Platform™ (Ecquaria SOP™), a comprehensive standards-based, open-source friendly and award-winning infrastructure that pioneers an innovative process-oriented approach for secure, efficient and collaborative sharing of information, best processes, practices and consolidated assets.

Representing world-first innovations, Ecquaria SOP™’s real-time business intelligence framework and performance management enterprise capabilities empower organizations to gain strategic control of their business processes, enforce good organizational governance practices and service-delivery practices.

Ecquaria SOP™ also enables organizations to achieve scalability via rapid knowledge replication when using Ecquaria SOP™ to build, integrate, deploy, manage and replicate applications involving complex business processes and workflows.

Founded in 1998 with its headquarters in Singapore, Ecquaria has global presence, with offices in Singapore, China, and an expanding network of partners in Thailand, Philippines, Brunei, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mexico and Africa to support the activities of its customers around the world. Ecquaria is an associate company of Frontline Technologies Corporation Limited. For more information about Ecquaria, please visit www.ecquaria.com

About Frontline Technologies Corporation Ltd 

Frontline Technologies Corporation Ltd (SGX: FRLT.SI) is a leading provider of end-to-end IT services. Frontline offers IT consulting, IT infrastructure, enterprise application solutions, system integration as well as outsourcing to help companies harness IT so as to drive operational and cost efficiency as well as business growth.

Established in 1993 and headquartered in Singapore, the Frontline Group has more than 3,900 professionals in nine key markets in Asia - China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand - to meet the specific needs of corporate organizations across a continuum of industries. Frontline is listed on the Main board of the Singapore Exchange since March 2001 and has been ranked in the top 10% of the Corporate Transparency Index (CTI) in Singapore.

For more information, please visit www.frontline.com.sg