How Tan Tock Seng Hospital replaced manual arrival queues with a smart, QR-driven access system

The Challenge

Managing thousands of daily access events at a major public hospital — without a unified system

A 1,700-bed acute care hospital is not a single building with a single door. TTSH is a campus of clinical departments, wards, specialist outpatient clinics, allied health services, and support functions — each with its own access requirements, staff populations, and visitor flows. On any given day, the hospital manages the movement of patients, accompanying family members, vendors, contractors, clinical and administrative staff, and external healthcare professionals. Without a centralised access management platform, each of these groups moved through the hospital on disconnected processes — paper registers at reception counters, manual card issuance for staff, and no unified audit trail across the facility.

The operational risks were concrete. Reception bottlenecks during peak visiting hours created queues that slowed patient experience and added pressure on frontline staff. Manual visitor logs provided no real-time visibility for security or operations teams — if an incident required a review of who was on the premises at a given time, the answer took effort to reconstruct. For a MOH-regulated institution subject to hospital accreditation standards, the inability to produce accurate, timestamped access records quickly is not a minor administrative gap.

The COVID-19 period sharpened this further. Visitor management in Singapore's public hospitals came under direct regulatory scrutiny, with tighter controls on the number of visitors permitted per patient, safe management measures at entry points, and a requirement for contact tracing records that could be retrieved quickly in the event of an exposure event. What had previously been an operational convenience became a compliance requirement — and the limitations of manual systems became difficult to absorb.

The Solution

Centralised software, smart hardware, and QR Code Technology — one system across the hospital

WerkDone deployed an integrated Access and Visitor Management System built around three layers working as one. The centralised management software serves as the single platform for all access activity across TTSH — every entry event, every visitor record, and every staff access log flows into one system, searchable and reportable in real time. Security and operations teams can see what is happening across the hospital without needing to aggregate information from multiple disconnected sources.

Smart hardware at access points handles the physical layer: access readers, entry terminals, and barriers that enforce the access rules set in the central platform. Different areas of the hospital carry different permission levels — clinical zones, wards, restricted departments, and general-access areas are all managed through the same system, with hardware that responds to the digital policy without requiring manual intervention at each point.

QR Code Technology addresses the visitor experience problem directly. Rather than queuing at a staffed reception counter to be manually logged, visitors can complete arrival procedures through a QR-based self-check-in flow — generating a time-stamped digital record that feeds automatically into the central system. The result is shorter queues at entry points, reduced administrative load on reception staff, and a digital visitor record created at the point of arrival rather than reconstructed from paper logs after the fact.

The system has been live at TTSH since November 2022 and continues to run as TTSH's access and visitor management platform, with WerkDone providing ongoing operational support.