In 2017, about 1 million hard copy medical certificates (MCs) were generated by Singhealth, Singapore's largest healthcare cluster.

But paper MCs are likely to soon be a thing of the past.

GovTech recently announced a digital MC system, called DigiMC, on Sep. 9.

How it works

With DigiMC, doctors generate a digital MC at a click of a button, which will be sent to the patient's registered phone number.

An SMS message containing a URL for accessing the digital MC will be sent to the patient, replacing the need for a hardcopy MC.

This message can then be forwarded to employers, and can also be backed up on commercial Cloud services for later reference.

The URL does not expire, so the MC can be accessed at any given time.

Difficult to forge

The URL will be assigned a unique string of alphanumeric characters, to ensure that each digital MC has a uniquely identifiable key.

If the MC is downloaded and saved as a PDF, employers can verify the legitimacy of the MC by accessing the URL printed on it.

Each MC generated via DigiMC will be hosted on a government-affiliated web domain (mc.gov.sg).

Privacy concerns

The team behind DigiMC has safeguards in place to prevent unauthorised access.

The digital MCs will require patients to unlock it with their date of birth.

Once the digital MC is unlocked, it can be forwarded, and subsequent users need not unlock it again.

This is to prevent cases of patients inputting a wrong phone number during registration, and having his or her MC disclosed to a stranger who has received the SMS message.

SingHealth to go paperless by 2020

There are plans for DigiMC to be implemented across all SingHealth institutions by early 2020.

DigiMC has been piloted at Singapore General Hospital and National Heart Centre Singapore, and 95 per cent of users surveyed were satisfied thus far.

While there are plans to implement DigiMC across all SingHealth institutions by early 2020, hardcopy MCs will still be issued in parallel with DigiMCs for a few months, in order to ensure a smooth transition.

This will allow employers sufficient time to adapt to the new system.

However, patients will still be able to request hardcopy MCs, should they require it.

Top image from Pixabay.