How Mount Elizabeth Hospital helped patients feel at ease, while eliminating shared print

The challenge

After COVID-era infection control cleared shared newspapers and magazines from Mount Elizabeth Hospital’s Orchard Road campus, the front-office team saw an opportunity to improve the patient experience across the board. Instead of simply reintroducing print, they could make a change that would ease waiting times, reduce the stress and worry associated with hospital visits and better serve a highly international patient base. 

The solution

The team wanted a digital solution that would minimize the need for print materials, while also serving a large volume (~50%) of international patients. Ideally, they wanted to increase patient comfort by providing newspapers and magazines in their own languages and making it easier to stay connected with home as they went through medical procedures. 

The impact

• • An expanded offering from roughly six local newspaper titles and a handful of magazines to thousands of leading publications from around the world 
  • Around 100 hours of staff time saved per year, once spent sourcing, distributing and maintaining print publications 
  • 100% reduction in print publications 
  • Addition of puzzles and games that ease the wait for younger patients, while providing cognitive stimulation  

Mount Elizabeth Hospital sits in the heart of Singapore’s Orchard Road district. Founded in 1979 and home to over 270 beds, it’s one of four private hospitals operated in Singapore by IHH Healthcare. The hospital is renowned for its patient experience, and this campus serves a distinctly international community. By the front-office team’s estimate, around half of its patients travel from outside Singapore. Many visit from across Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Vietnam, Brunei, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, alongside visitors from Europe and the United States. PressReader has been available at the Orchard Road hospital since 2022.

Waiting is part of almost every hospital visit, and it’s rarely relaxing. Patients and their families often arrive anxious about the care ahead, and the time spent in a lobby, treatment waiting room, or by a bedside can heighten that unease. Those moments matter. Giving patients and visitors a meaningful form of entertainment is a small but real way to support them.

Before the pandemic, the hospital offered that comfort in part through a small selection of local newspapers and magazines. However, COVID-era infection control made it necessary to clear them away. As restrictions eased in 2022 and the front-office team considered how to bring reading material back, the hygiene concern remained. Shared physical copies pass through many hands, which is far from ideal in a hospital setting.

The team treated the pause as a chance to improve the old process. They needed a digital solution that patients could access at any point in their stay, no matter where they were in the hospital. Plus, with many patients arriving from outside of Singapore, they wanted to offer a selection of international publications in various languages. Across the board, the goal was to improve the patient experience for as many as possible.

The front office found its answer in PressReader, which gives patients unlimited access to thousands of leading newspapers and magazines from around the world, in dozens of languages, on their own phones and tablets. From the moment they step into the complex, patients can connect over the hospital’s Wi-Fi, and the platform is promoted on the in-room television and introduced during room orientation. The team chose it for four reasons:

1. Reading in the patient’s own language
With thousands of international titles and translation just one click away, patients from across Southeast Asia and beyond can read leading publications in their preferred language. And it’s easy to do. “It’s the whole access that makes it easy to navigate — you just click the language you want, and it filters,” says Jacinthe Leow, Front Office Manager at Mount Elizabeth Hospital.

2. A hygienic, paper-free experience
Because each patient reads on their own device, there’s no shared print to manage or worry about. This also aligns with the hospital’s wider sustainability efforts to cut down on paper.

3. Less waste and less work for staff
With nothing physical to put out or maintain, staff are freed from the daily work that print requires. Going digital also ended the steady accumulation and disposal of unread print materials.

4. Games and puzzles for younger patients
PressReader’s puzzles and games are a natural draw for children, both pediatric patients and those waiting with family. As Jacinthe puts it, they give younger patients “something they can work on besides watching movies on a tablet and help take their focus away from their procedure or pain.”

Since 2022, PressReader has helped reshape the experience for patients from the moment they arrive, to the moment they depart. The campus has gone from roughly six local newspaper titles and a handful of magazines to thousands of international publications. This breadth of content means that every patient that arrives at Mount Elizabeth is likely to find something to read or interact with that will ease their stay.

The puzzles and games, meanwhile, have found an audience among the hospital’s youngest visitors, a quiet way to ease the wait for a child, whether they’re the patient or visiting with family.

For the staff at Mount Elizabeth, PressReader means less work and more time back. The hospital no longer sets out newspapers or magazines. On the rare occasion a patient without a device would like something to read, a staff member picks up a single local copy for them.

By the team’s estimate, PressReader has given them back over 100 hours a year that used to be spent on keeping print stands stocked, current and tidy. This is time they can now spend with patients. The old rhythm of receiving monthly deliveries, allocating storage for them and discarding what went unread has also fallen away.