Working towards greater data integration in healthcare – origins of NUHS's DISCOVERY AI platform

"I think the biggest trend (in healthcare) is towards greater integration. Traditionally, healthcare has been very fragmented, where many different groups serve specific clinical needs without necessarily coordinating with each other. But going forward, the trend is towards integration – not just of things like databases and systems, but integration of the way we process the data and how this influences the clinical workflow," said Prof Ngiam Kee Yuan, Group Chief Technology Officer of National University Health System (NUHS) in Singapore, in response to what he thought would be the key trends that will impact healthcare systems in future. It was with the same motivation and mission to best use the healthcare data for research at NUHS that led to the building and development of the DISCOVERY AI platform, which started about four years ago and the platform was officially announced in July 2018. The platform is what Prof Ngiam describes as a'sandbox' that allows the staff at NUHS to develop AI tools in a safe and equitable way – the platform is scalable and can be applied to more than one system within the organisation.