SingHealth to replace paper medical certificates with digital MCs by 2020

SINGAPORE - Paper Medical Certificates (MC) issued by SingHealth Institutions are expected to be replaced by Digital MCs by 2020 based on news from Government Technology Agency.

In 2017, there is around one million hardcopy MCs that were generated by SingHealth, Singapore's largest public healthcare party. SingHealth, which oversees several hospitals including the Changi and Sengkang general hospitals, generated one million hardcopy MCs in 2017. Most of the organisations also suffer administrative hassle like damaged or forged when keeping records of the submissions MC from employees.
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In order to overcome this issue, a team from Open Government Products (OGP), a division of the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) has built a digital system call DigiMC for patients to receive digital MCs and plan to implement digital MCs by early 2020. The team wanted to create digital MCs that could be verified as true copies, be shared among healthcare providers, patients and employers, and be easily incorporated into a doctor’s existing workflow system.

A doctor can create the MC using an existing software interface, which then generates a URL, also known as a web address, that can be sent via Short Message Service (SMS) to the patient’s mobile phone.

The patient can access the MC by clicking on the URL. The SMS can also be forwarded to the patient’s employers. The SMS can be backed up on commercial cloud services for later reference, allowing it to be accessed perpetually.


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