The government is investing $3 million dollars to come up with infocomm solutions to improve cost-efficiency and the quality of healthcare in both public and private institutions.

This will be done through a tripartite tie-up between the Health Ministry, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and The Enterprise Challenge (TEC) under the Prime Minister's Office.

In a statement on Thursday, the three parties announced the launch of a joint Healthcare call-for-collaboration (CFC) to encourage innovations in several areas.

One area is in the the delivery of safer care. This includes enhancing medication safety, reducing healthcare associated infections. They will also aim at improving communication among healthcare practitioners during patient handovers and ensuring that procedures are carried out correctly, for example, right implant and right patient.

Another area will be in enhancing the quality of care. This includes providing care the patient needs according to best medical science and timely information. They will also look at improving the continuity of care, and reducing reworks like re-admission or repeat procedures.

A third area will be achieving greater efficiency in healthcare operations by facilitating re-engineering of workflows, and simplification and standardisation of processes.

The collaboration is part of IDA's iN2015 plan for the Healthcare sector to better leverage on Infocomm technology (ICT) effectively to enable innovation in healthcare delivery processes.

Under a previous Healthcare CFC issued by IDA in 2005, 12 innovative projects from the healthcare and ICT sectors were supported.

The innovations included a project by the National Skin Centre to allow doctors to describe patients' conditions diagrammatically with precise location of the clinical findings in electronic form.

Under another project,the Singapore General Hospital piloted an integrated wireless monitoring system that can automatically capture a wide range of patients' vital signs, such as blood pressure, pulse rate and temperature, in its Digital Ward.