NHIC announces the appointment of next Executive Director

Appointment of Associate Professor Henry Ho as Executive Director, NHIC from 1 January 2023

Associate Professor Henry Ho will be appointed as the Executive Director, NHIC from 1 January 2023 for a term of three years. A/Prof Ho is currently a senior consultant with the Department of Urology and Chairman, Division of Surgery & Surgical Oncology, Singapore General Hospital (SGH) and the National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS). He completed his surgical fellowship in robotic surgery in 2007 and was also the first doctor in SGH/SingHealth to be awarded the Singapore Stanford Biodesign Fellowship Award by A*STAR in 2011.

As an accomplished medical device innovator, A/Prof Prof Ho has brought a research idea to a commercial product Mona Lisa (Biobot Surgicals Pte Ltd) Ltd) which has been deployed in SGH, Changi General Hospital (CGH), Sengkang General Hospital (SKH) and National University Hospital (NUH). Mona Lisa was also sold in Australia, China and Germany.

As a passionate innovator, he has helped many innovators to succeed in their innovation projects such as Klaro. He did this through the SingHealth Medical Technological Office where he served as Director until 2021. Currently, he leads the SingHealth Innovation Centre as the Clinical Director.

During the pandemic, A/Prof Ho contributed to the SingHealth Community Care Facility (CCF) @ Expo as the Medical Director and innovation lead. He implemented the use of robots in “hot zones” to minimise healthcare providers’ exposure and created an app (Dr Covid) to help migrant workers with information and psychological support. In 2021, he was awarded the Healthcare Superhero award for COVID-19 at the Singapore Health Quality Service Awards organised by the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre. In 2022, he was awarded the National Day Award Public Administration Medal (Bronze) and the National Awards (COVID-19) Commendation Medal for his contributions to healthcare innovation and outstanding performance during the pandemic.

As the next Executive Director of NHIC, A/Prof Ho will have the responsibility to lead NHIC into its next phase, guide its holistic suite of programmes and drive greater collaborations with NHIC’s strong network of public and private sector partners. This will catalyse the translation of clinical innovations towards commercially viable products that can be adopted into public healthcare across Singapore and beyond borders to benefit patients.

We warmly welcome A/Prof Ho and look forward to his leadership to power product ideation, technology development, clinical adoption and commercialisation of healthtech innovations in Singapore.

Prof Tina Wong completes term of office as Executive Director, NHIC on 31 Dec 2022

Professor Tina Wong, who is Executive Director of the National Health Innovation Centre Singapore (NHIC) will complete her term of office on 31 December 2022. Tina has served two terms at NHIC since 2017 and has led NHIC in launching several programmes that accelerated the development of innovative clinical technologies towards commercialisation and adoption.  

Under Prof Wong’s stewardship, NHIC led the Innovation to Industry (I2I)scheme and jointly started the Innovation to Startup (I2START) grant with Enterprise Singapore and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART).

During her term, she also led NHIC to participate in the Expanded Singapore Therapeutics Development Review (eSTDR) programme as a strategic partner. Together with the Centre for Healthcare Assistive & Robotics Technology (CHART), NHIC also launched the Singapore Healthcare Assistive and Robotics Programme (SHARP) which enables smart health facilities.

To further strengthen these schemes, talent development programmes were also incorporated through a partnership with Singapore BioDesign to train clinician innovators and entrepreneurs.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, NHIC was instrumental in supporting MOH with quick turnaround technology assessments and swift administration of COVID-19 grants.

Recently in 2022, Prof Wong led the rebranding of NHIC to offer a holistic suite of programmes to power healthtech innovations in Singapore. These include a Clinical Innovation and Adoption Initiative (I2Adopt), to enable the adoption of cost-effective clinical innovations across the local public health clusters, building venture co-creation and technology development partnerships and nurturing tri-competent healthtech talent.

Under her leadership, NHIC facilitated the transaction of 49 commercial licences, generating S$3.4 million of licensing revenue, and catalysed the formation of 16 spin-offs, raising a total investment amount of more than S$32 million.

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Prof Wong for her dedication and guidance to the team at NHIC.

The National Health Innovation Centre Singapore (NHIC) is a programme of the Consortium for Clinical Research and Innovation, Singapore (CRIS).