Healthier SG: a gateway for evolving public-private-population partnerships in population health

Abstract

Singapore’s primary healthcare landscape is dominated by private sector general practitioners, who have more room to play in terms of safeguarding the health of the population. Through a transformative national policy, Healthier SG, Singapore is evolving its health system to lean on private-public partnerships. This is achieved through shared care protocols, interoperable IT requirements, new models of financing, shared responsibilities and human resources and, importantly, a bidirectional feedback channel. The Ministry of Health has attempted to address most of the pressing issues that prevent private sector general practitioners from enrolling into this newly implemented national primary care policy but continues to face unintended challenges. Disjointed and misplaced expectations between stakeholders, arduous administrative requirements that GPs need to perform to get their reimbursement, cherry-picking simpler patients to enrol as it makes more business sense and the prospect of continued care fragmentation are some of the loops that this national policy will need to jump through.