Dr. Wai Chiong Loke, KPMG in Singapore 

My name is Wai Chiong Loke. I’m medically trained as a doctor and I was trained as a family physician; spent four years in hospitals and seven years in primary care practice. Over the years of my life of course I’ve done various things, I’ve run primary care clinics, I’ve worked at the group of hospital level, running quality improvement patient safety programs, clinical manpower which involved going around the world recruiting doctors for Singapore. And basically managing human resource management for a large group, 700+ doctors across the whole system. I also spent some time after that with the government; I was in both the Ministry of Health as well as the Economic Development Board of Singapore. Basically I was running a new unit that was set up to bring companies into Singapore to work closely with hospitals and care providers, come up with new solutions. So two aims, at the end of the day. One is to achieve better patients’ outcomes, health outcomes, and the other one is to achieve economic outcomes for the country. Really building up a new industry for us. I spent time doing that and then the opportunity came up to join KPMG as part of the Global Center of Excellence, and it was an opportunity I couldn’t say no to.

We are speaking to governments who are struggling with the challenge of aging populations, chronic disease. And so there’s a need to restructure, sometimes reform their entire health systems in terms of infrastructure buildup, how many hospitals to build, how much manpower to train for the next five, ten years. Financing systems, they need to think about new ways of financing healthcare and keeping costs low. So I think that’s a big opportunity there and we are working with several countries across As/Pac on that. In quality margin improvement there’s also many opportunities for public as well as private hospitals struggling with the lowering cost and still delivering high quality care. What I find useful from my past experience in working with HR and also medical manpower is also helping hospitals, helping health systems figure out their workforce strategies for the future. How they’re going to maintain a pipeline and keep it up so that there are enough doctors and nurses when the time comes, when demand really goes up. I enjoy working also with innovators and business and enterprises, in terms of turning good ideas into viable businesses. I think that is an interesting area, because lots of new—we need new products, new services, new business models, in order to tackle all the challenges we’re facing in health care today. And I think we have lots of that in ASPAC.