Managing limited resources is a constant pressure for hospitals around the world. Singapore General Hospital (SGH) is no different, as it faced patient flow challenges from admission to discharge. These challenges are pervasive and affect every step of a patient’s journey, so SGH leadership knew it was time to find a solution that worked to combat these problems head on.

In 2019, SGH was ranked third in Newsweek’s “World’s Best Hospitals,” a title not easily awarded. As the first and largest hospital in Singapore, this not-for-profit institution is wholly owned by the government of Singapore and is the largest hospital in the SingHealth group. It also serves as the flagship hospital of the cluster as well as functions as Singapore’s national hospital. With all this responsibility, SGH leadership knew that it was time to address its patient flow problems and find out how to streamline bed availability—along with other areas of interest.

Wanting to harness the ability to dynamically manage bed situation in crisis and emergency situations, SGH leaders opted to introduce a new technology to enable the organization to fully address this bed availability issue and drive the organization’s outcomes to new heights.

SGH selected Altera’s Sunrise™ solution, more specifically Altera Patient Flow™, to efficiently manage beds, keep an eye on housekeeping tasks, prevent overcrowding problems and improve efficient and accurate bed assignments. Amid a global pandemic, digital care transformation has never been more critical. Altera’s partnership with SGH came at just the right time, enabling the hospital to fully address its bed availability problems. Speaking about the effects of this partnership, Dr. Gan Wee Hoe, Chief Medical Informatics Officer at SGH, stated, “Based on an estimated daily admission of 300 patients, Altera Patient Flow’s automation features enable the processing time of a bed request to be reduced from an average of 65 minutes to 25 minutes. This frees up 200 man-hours per day that can be channeled to other patient-centric tasks.”

Hand-in-hand with the Sunrise solution, SGH enabled its practice to reach its full bed availability potential. To read the full success story, click here.