SINGAPORE – A day in the life of healthcare staff from the National University Health System (NUHS) will soon be very different.

Instead of spending time writing referral letters for patients, doctors will be able to tap on the healthcare cluster’s version of ChatGPT to do the task. Hospital staff will also be able to better allocate resources when they use artificial intelligence (AI) to estimate the duration of a patient’s hospitalisation – much like how hotels have precise information on room occupancy rates.

Powering all these advancements is Singapore’s third national supercomputer located at National University Hospital.

Called Prescience, the supercomputer has been operational since July 31, after NUHS and the National Supercomputing Centre Singapore (NSCC) inked an agreement to develop it on Dec 3, 2021.

Supercomputer systems are extremely powerful and can process complex tasks such as large-scale AI and machine learning tasks, enabling rapid analysis and learning from large, complicated sets of data.

Singapore’s first such computer, Aspire 1, was set up in 2016, while the second, Aspire 2a, has been operational since July 2023. Both are used for a broad range of research such as climate change, weather monitoring, urban planning, healthcare and materials research.

Prescience, on the other hand, is dedicated to healthcare and medical research.

It can handle large language models (LLMs) that enable researchers to use medical big data to train LLMs for Singapore’s healthcare needs.

LLMs are deep learning algorithms that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict and generate text and other forms of content based on knowledge gained from massive datasets.

NUHS’ version, called the NUHS Russell-GPT, can summarise patient case notes and write referral letters for doctors in a matter of seconds.

This AI model also allows NUHS staff to ask questions, such as those related to...