William Chew, Managing Director, myHealth Sentinel
myHealth Sentinel Pte Ltd (mHS) is a Singapore-based health IT SME, specializing in the delivery of ‘Point-of-Care’ Medical Data Connectivity (MCS) solutions for public and private healthcare systems.
The company was founded in March 2011, answering the call of the Singapore government to the private sector, for new technological approaches to help deal with the looming healthcare crisis arising from the rapid aging of the Baby Boomer generation.
Leveraging on the extensive telecommunications and systems integration experience of the company’s founders, from its inception, mHS has focused on providing the ‘foundational IT technologies’ essential to the Digital Transformation’ of healthcare in Asia.
The Inception Tale
The company’s launch product was “TeleMetrix+” (TM+), the first cloud-based, remote ‘Vital Signs Monitoring’ (VSM) platform in SE Asia. The TM+ application was specifically designed in collaboration with medical experts, to remotely track, analyze and manage patient vital signs data such as BP, BG, Blood Oxygen, temperature, and weight. mHS won a telehealth government project in 2013, involving over 800 patients with National University Hospital (NUH), which yielded extremely positive clinical patient outcomes. As a result of this clinical success, NUH approved the TM+ platform as a ‘standard hospital medical service’ available for prescription to NUH outpatients. Thus TM+ became the first commercially available, medically-endorsed VSM telehealth service in Singapore. TM+ has since been deployed to over 4,500 unique patients.
In 2014, mHS expanded its digital healthcare portfolio to encompass ‘Medical Device Integration’ (MDI), partnering with a leading US company (“iSirona”) to bring their solution to Singapore. Their“DeviceConX” (DCX) MDI solution automatically captures and digitizes readings in real-time, from a wide array of ‘point-of-care’ medical devices within hospitals(eg. beside monitors, OT devices, ventilators, dialysis machines, etc) harmonizes the data, and manages its seamless integration through a single API/interface, into patient records within the hospital EMR. mHS has implemented its MDI across 8 major public and private hospitals, including Singapore General, Changi General, Ng Teng Fong, Mount Alvernia, and the National Heart Centre.
In 2018, mHS further extended its range of digital healthcare technologies by partnering with Isansys, an exciting UK-based company offering a wireless, continuous patient monitoring platform (“Patient Status Engine”), which incorporates advanced, wearable, wireless patches, which monitor ECG, HR, RR, temperature, and body position.
Mr. William Chew, Managing Director and Co-Founder of the company, says, that “mHS is one of the few commercial healthcare IT companies in the world, that offers such a complementary range of leading-edgeIT solutions that enables healthcare providers to digitize, manageand share patient vital signs data from the ‘Point-of-Care’,across their extended healthcare ecosystem.”
Digital Healthcare Platform Benefits
TeleMetrix+: A Simple, Field-Proven ‘VSM Subscription-Service’
“TeleMetrix+” (TM+) is available to hospitals, nursing homes, public/private sector GP’s, and home nursing companies, based on a simple and cost-effective monthly subscription. This eliminates the technological complexity, operational overhead, and risk which have historically been significant barriers to mainstream telehealth adoption. mHS’ ‘VSM-as-a-Service’ model, enables healthcare system providers a cost-effective and scalable way to manage the healthcare needs of the growing ranks of the elderly chronic disease sufferers in our community.
The company’s “DeviceConX” (DCX) MDI platform from iSirona (recently acquired by Masimo), streamlines nursing workflow in hospitals by eliminating the need for the manual charting of patient vital signs. TheDCX ‘middleware’ solution also importantly harmonizes and consolidates the multitude of different types of data, coming from the many different medical devices across the hospital, into the hospital’s EMR.
The ‘Patient Status Engine’ platform from partner “Isansys”, utilizes the latest wearable wireless patch technology to provide continuous monitoring of patient vital signs in real-time. This represents a huge advance in simplifying nursing workloads, especially relevant in today’s pandemic prone scenarios. It liberates patients from the need to be ‘strapped’ to medical devices and enables them to be actively monitored even when walking beyond their hospital rooms.
Core Values of mHS
mHS corporate ethos is as a ‘service provider’ rather than a technology supplier. “We view ourselves as ‘long term partners’ to the community of healthcare providers. Hence, providing high-quality customer service is one of our top business priorities,” asserts, William.
The company’s core values foster a company culture of mutual respect and teamwork. We each have the power to make a positive difference in the lives of others and our larger society,” says, William. The ‘5+C’s that matters the most at mHS are Creativity, Courage, Collaboration, Communication, and Commitment.
The company recognizes its staff for their achievements by adopting a policy of promoting from within and by investing in their career development through training to upgrade their professional skills. The fact that the average tenure of our team is over 5+ years can be reasonably interpreted as evidence of their job satisfaction.
Achieving Success
According to William, there are three main contributing factors to mHS’ success and longevity in a fiercely Darwinian industry.
The first is its overarching business vision and strategic nimbleness. Early on, mHS adopted a forward-looking business view, which identified the ‘mega-trends’ driving change in global healthcare, such as rapidly aging population demographics, surging growth of chronic diseases, the unsustainability of ever-expanding healthcare budgets.
The second success factor was the company’s nimbleness in positioning itself with the right solutions at the right time to serve the emerging needs of our healthcare customers.
The final factor is that our company adheres to a ‘B2B’ model, leveraging on public and private partnerships to serve the In-patient (Acute) and Outpatient (Primary, Chronic, Community Care) as well as Corporate Wellness markets. “We seek long term partnerships with hospitals, GP’s, video-based telemedicine companies, EMR-HIS providers, medical device suppliers, and health insurers, to complement and enhance their own branded offerings, rather than compete with them,” asserts William.
Blazing the Path Forward
The unprecedented nature and scale of the Covid pandemic has disrupted the traditional, ‘face-to-face’ models of healthcare and thrust telehealth and remote VSM technology companies, like mHS, into the spotlight. Governments and even insurance companies are now ‘leading the charge’ in remaking healthcare delivery models, with digital technologies playing a central role. Video-based telemedicine consults are growing at double and triple-digit rates.
In this new environment, mHS is formulating plans to accelerate its growth through partnerships with nursing homes, GP groups, video telemedicine start-ups, diagnostic labs, and suppliers of ‘Clinic Management Systems’ (CMS), all of whom are now seeking to add ‘virtual healthcare’ to their business models. “We are also actively exploring partnerships to springboard into the regional markets,” concludes William.
mHS is uniquely positioned as one of the few companies in Asia focused and experienced in providing the digital platforms, essential to helping healthcare systems in their journey of transformation.