Background
Kwong Wai Shiu Hospital (KWSH) is one of Singapore’s oldest and largest charitable healthcare institutions, offering a comprehensive range of services including inpatient care, outpatient clinics, rehabilitation, and community health programmes. Its largest division is the nursing home, with over 1,100 beds across two locations in Potong Pasir and Serangoon.
In 2025, CVWO partnered with KWSH to address a recurring operational challenge faced by its nursing home staff. Nurses often had to manually contact the next of kin (NOK) of patients to seek consent for activities such as vaccinations. We therefore created a platform that enables seamless communication between nurses and NOK through broadcasts and messaging.
This year, we introduced new features and several refinements to make the platform more resilient.
Key Contributions
Singpass Integration
To accelerate user adoption while keeping sensitive data secure, we introduced the ability for NOK to log in with Singpass. This coexists with the current email and SMS two-factor authentication, which are used as fallbacks when a user’s NRIC is not found in the database.
Billing Module
KWSH currently distributes its monthly bills manually through physical mail. This is highly time-consuming and inefficient. To alleviate this, the module we created allows staff to upload files in batches and parses each patient’s NRIC and billing month from the file name. NOK with the Financial Guarantor role can view and save the bills from the app.
Improved Syncing Mechanism
Our system relies on KWSH’s database as the single source of truth for patient and NOK data. This year, we made several improvements to make the mechanism more transparent and resilient, and to improve end users’ control over the process.
These improvements include creating daily snapshots that can be applied easily, the ability to pause the application of sync data, user-viewable logs, and preservation of the original data sent to the platform. This helps us identify the source of errors whenever an issue occurs and recover lost data easily to ensure our application’s uptime.
Project Team
- Hon Yi Hao (Project Lead, Year 2)
- Apicha Maneerat (Suki) (Developer, Year 1)
- Zhang Yilin (Developer, Year 1)
- Ooi Xuan Shan (Developer, Year 1)
- Henry Lee (Developer, Year 1)
- Suvan Handa (Developer, Year 1)
Afterthoughts
I am grateful for the opportunity to serve in CVWO again and for the trust placed in me to manage production applications, liaise with clients, and manage a team of brilliant individuals. This is an experience that is hardly found anywhere else in an internship.
– Yi Hao
CVWO gave me the chance to build software while learning that doing so can be meaningful. It has been a challenging and rewarding experience, and I am grateful to have worked alongside such a supportive team.
– Suki
CVWO gave me the opportunity to use the computing skills I learnt in class to serve the community in a structured format, with guidance from computing professionals and professors.
– Yilin
CVWO taught me that simply writing code that works is not enough. I learned that prioritising clean and structured code is essential because it improves both code readability and overall efficiency.
– Xuan Shan
CVWO has provided a rewarding opportunity to learn more about software engineering while helping the community.
– Henry
I joined the CVWO programme expecting to sharpen my technical skills. However, the biggest lesson I learnt was that great engineering is actually about understanding people and building solutions that truly meet their needs.
– Suvan
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to the following individuals and organisations for their invaluable support and influence throughout our project:
- GIC for their generous support
- Prof. Ben Leong (NUS) and Patrick Wang (NUS) for their guidance and mentorship