NUH’s Kent Ridge Office of Resources wins at the Singapore Business Review Management Excellence Awards 2025

Innovative resource management and manpower optimisation drive cost containment and operational excellence.

National University Hospital (NUH) won the Employee Engagement of the Year - Healthcare award at the Singapore Business Review Management Excellence Awards 2025. The award recognises the hospital’s Kent Ridge Office of Resources (KROR) for its strategic and innovative approach in optimising workforce deployment, enhancing employee development, and managing resources sustainably.

Established in 2024, KROR brings together a multidisciplinary team of doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, operations staff, and IT specialists to address escalating healthcare costs whilst maintaining high patient care standards. In its inaugural year, the team implemented multi-pronged initiatives, combining workforce planning, digital transformation, and change management, achieving remarkable cost containment of close to $26m for NUH. Through its Community of Practice framework, KROR shared best practices across the National University Health System (NUHS), generating an additional $10m in cost savings within a year.

A key focus for KROR is manpower optimisation. The team partnered with nursing and allied health departments to establish staffing norms and optimise deployment. This initiative positioned NUH as an efficient tertiary hospital and laid the foundation for a 10-year workforce roadmap, targeting at least 10% productivity improvement by 2030. Complementing this is the expansion of Appropriate Value Based Care which reduce clinical waste, improve quality, and create opportunities for collaboration with insurance providers to contain healthcare premiums.

The Vendor and Contract Management unit, which plays an essential role in KROR, streamlines supplies and services contracts to combat escalating healthcare costs. By engaging suppliers early and aligning hospital needs with vendor cost drivers, the team guided departments to optimise value and eliminate redundancies. A notable success is the extension of contract durations and turnaround times for non-invasive prenatal testing services, enabling vendors to pass cost savings back to NUH. Similar efforts stretched to the Department of Diagnostic Imaging where they upgraded existing MRI equipment instead of buying new ones, achieving better financial and environmental sustainability outcomes. To transfer knowledge, the team also published a contract management playbook and conducted training programmes as part of employee development initiatives.

Digital transformation underpinned KROR’s efforts. AI-driven scheduling, predictive analytics, and Electronic Medical Records (EMR) automation have significantly enhanced clinical throughput and elective care capacity. The workforce enablement initiatives focused on advancing digital literacy and mobile EMR access and supporting pilots in AI diagnostics and genomics integration. The mass training of the hospital’s doctors in 2025’s Great Epic Transformation yielded measurable improvements in clinician productivity, with extensions planned for nursing, allied health, and other NUHS institutions.

Through KROR's strategy of investing in the future, NUH demonstrates how multidisciplinary collaboration and innovative resource management can deliver exceptional financial outcomes whilst strengthening Singapore's healthcare sustainability for generations to come.

The Singapore Business Review Management Excellence Awards honours visionary executives, innovators, and high-performing teams, as well as initiatives that champion diversity, inclusion, employee engagement, and workplace well-being.

The Singapore Business Review Management Excellence Awards is presented by Singapore Business Review Magazine. To view the full list of winners, click here. If you want to know more about the awards programme, you may contact Julie Anne Nuñez-Difuntorum at (+65) 3158 1386 ext. 221 or [email protected].