Employees may soon be forwarding their MCs to bosses through SMS messages
Submitting a medical certificate (MC) or doctor’s note to take sick leave is common practice in Singapore.
By 2020, SingHealth, the state’s largest public healthcare group, will replace hardcopy MCs with digital certificates.
The team behind the new system will work to ensure that DigiMCs remain authentic and are easily sharable between healthcare providers, patients and employers.
READ MORE: Sick leave in Singapore: Are MCs mandatory?
According to SingHealth, in 2017 about one million hardcopy MCs were issued.
DigiMCs aim to create a system allowing clinics and hospitals to generate certs in digital form, and ensure that it’s easy to incorporate into existing workflows — from healthcare institutions to offices.
Upon clicking ‘save’ on the MC creation software, the system generates a URL for DigiMC access. The link will be sent to the patient’s registered phone number.
“Instead of printing a hardcopy MC, an SMS message [containing the URL] is sent to the patient, which they can forward to their employers,” said Annabelle Ng, product manager at Open Government Products (OGP), a division of GovTech.
She added that the URL does not expire, so employers can always access the MC for administrative purposes.
Verifiably authentic MCs
The team behind the DigiMC assured that a system is in place to ensure that certs are legitimate. Certs can be verified authentic as they’re hosted on a government-affiliated web domain, “mc.gov.sg".
Each DigiMC URL also has a unique set of characters for identification purposes. Employers can check whether the MC has been altered by tracking the character key.
“Even if the digital MC is downloaded and saved as a PDF, employers can still validate the document using the URL printed at the bottom of the digital MC,” said Chong Zi Xin, product manager at OGP.
The DigiMC has been piloted at two institutions under SingHealth — Singapore General Hospital and the National Heart Centre, according to GovTech’s media release.
The OGP team plans to implement digital certs across all SingHealth institutions by early 2020.
To ensure a smooth transition, DigiMCs will be issued together with hardcopy MCs for a few months before hardcopies are phased out completely. This is to allow time for employers to adapt their sick leave procedures accordingly.
