With initiatives focused on healthy habits and prevention, the Singapore government has poured more resources into its healthcare system over the past few years. Backed by generously subsidised screenings¹ and underpinned by a long-term masterplan,² more residents now have a dedicated care programme under Healthier SG.³ By most measures, the system is working. So why do healthcare providers say that it’s getting harder, not easier, to deliver good care?

Under the Three Beyonds strategy, care is now moving beyond hospitals and into homes, clinics, and community settings.⁴ This was good for patients, but it multiplied the number of handoffs. In this article, we look at surveys and studies that show that while Singapore’s healthcare policy has made progress on expanding capacity, the growing problem now is coordination across a complex healthcare system.

This is Disconnected Care: where patients, clinicians, systems, and care settings struggle to stay connected throughout the care journey. Left unresolved, Disconnected Care increases operational complexity, raises costs, and makes it harder for providers to deliver high-quality care and achieve better patient outcomes.

Singapore’s policy interventions were created at a critical point in time. A survey by the Singapore Management University (SMU) Centre for Research on Successful Ageing (ROSA) found that by 2030, 1 in 4 Singaporeans will be aged 65 and over,⁵ driving demand for specialised, long-term elderly care and chronic disease management. More patients will require more continuous care from more settings than ever before.

While the Healthcare 2020 masterplan successfully expanded infrastructure and achieved financing and subsidy goals, policymakers recognised that hospitals alone could not absorb this increased and more complex demand. Even as Singapore continues to expand hospital bed capacity, an ageing population and rising prevalence of chronic conditions mean that demand for care will continue to grow. The priority therefore needs to shift beyond treating illness in hospitals towards continuous, preventive care that can help people stay healthier and reduce avoidable demand on acute care services. Achieving this requires stronger, more coordinated care across providers and settings with healthcare models that can keep patients engaged in preventive and continuous care before their needs escalate to the hospital.

Policymakers addressed that need by decentralising care into GPs and polyclinics. More than 1,100 of these participate in Healthier SG, establishing a private-public partnership framework for primary care. However, this is also where the strain shows up.

A survey⁷ has shown that 87% of physicians report an increase in administrative work and 93% said their patients are confused about the programme – showing that while extending capacity has solved some issues, they have also given rise to more.

At the same time, care is moving further into patients’ homes.⁸ This creates a need for providers to monitor patients remotely through connected devices and wearables, while supporting care on the ground through home and mobile nursing teams. As care becomes more distributed, providers need to coordinate patient data, clinical decisions, and interventions in even more settings.

These challenges exist with manpower shortages, especially for nurses and healthcare professionals providing intermediate and long-term care (ITLC), as well as high bed occupancy rates, fragmented workflows, and incomplete data sharing.

For physicians, these challenges become pressure points that shape their ability to deliver care. They face more care demand with fewer physical buffers. As they practise across increasingly decentralised care settings, workforce productivity becomes a strategic priority.

Singapore’s experience shows that over time, fragmentation problems don’t stay operational for long – they become financial ones. 

Healthcare costs are driven by the long-term and increasingly complicated care needed by an aging population, alongside manpower shortages, wage pressure, and heavy utilisation.

Health minister Ong Ye Kung⁹ has called the latter “buffet syndrome” – because of full-coverage insurance riders, providers order more tests and prescribe more treatments, which patients are happy to accept because they are already paid for. This creates a vicious cycle, where overconsumption leads to escalating claims and premiums that keep rising for policyholders. Administrative inefficiencies and duplicated work further increase costs without improving patient outcomes. Partially due to these combined factors, government healthcare expenditure is projected to approach SGD30 billion by 2030, rising from SGD9 billion in 2015 and SGD20.9 billion in 2025.¹⁰

Coordination challenges become cost outcomes, impacting productivity, workforce sustainability, service delivery, and financial performance. Digital transformation now becomes an important component of healthcare delivery to solve these coordination gaps – but it must be well-integrated, not treated as a separate IT initiative. 

Singapore's public healthcare system is among the most digitised in the region, but gaps remain. Private clinics, community providers, and home-based care often run on separate systems that do not “talk” to each other. The result: data silos, administrative work duplicated across visits, and patient histories that arrive incomplete.

Providers attempt to fill these gaps by adding new tools. But when workflows are not redesigned for these new tools and clinical adoption is not supported, you end up with capable, well-funded tools that clinicians don't trust and rarely use,¹¹ while the underlying problems they were meant to solve persist.

This resistance to change carries a cost of its own. Manpower is Singapore's scarcest and most expensive healthcare resource, and when providers delay tools like automation, predictive analytics, or AI-assisted triage, administrative workloads that could be lightened stay heavy. Staff burnout deepens. Clinical wages climb in response, feeding directly back into the national healthcare bill.

The cost of delayed digital transformation isn't confined to outdated systems. It shows up in longer workflows, effort duplicated across settings, poorer coordination, and a less consistent experience for the patient at the centre of it all.

What might a digitally transformed healthcare setting look like, and how might it address these coordination gaps? It could look like providing healthcare providers with the tools they need to have continuous visibility over their patients no matter the care settings – from homes to clinics to hospitals – such as patient wearables and IoT devices. It could be having reliable, secure, and continuous network connections so that data handoffs are seamless and not confined in silos. It could even be augmenting staff on the ground with robotic support companions, virtual reality consults, and holographic visualisations.

With connectivity such as 5G network slicing for hospital operations underpinning these solutions, it is possible to improve patient outcomes, reduce costs, and expand access to quality care. Fragmentation and disconnection can be overcome with planning, innovation, and connected intelligence.

Solving Disconnected Care requires a connected foundation that allows patients, providers, systems, and care settings to work as one ecosystem. The next phase of Singapore's healthcare transformation depends on providing patients one cohesive journey across the different handoff points in their care. Under this view, digital transformation no longer becomes “just” a technology initiative. It becomes an opportunity to reduce Disconnected Care and strengthen healthcare ecosystem collaboration.

Singtel is working with healthcare organisations to build this ecosystem. The future of healthcare is a connected experience, enabling patients to enjoy seamless care, wherever they are.