Can access to or sharing of NEHR be refused/denied?

If you do not want any healthcare professional to access your health record, you can choose to restrict access to your NEHR. Once access is restricted, healthcare professionals must not access your NEHR even for care purposes. You can already restrict such access to NEHR today by opting out of sharing through the NEHR.

Under the proposed HIB in future, MOH will refine the access restriction regime to enable greater autonomy and enhance patient safety:

•         We will enable patients to select the healthcare providers who can access their NEHR information

•         A basic set of health information (i.e. allergies, vaccination records, together with key demographic information i.e. name, NRIC or FIN, date of birth, race and gender) will remain accessible to healthcare providers even if an access restriction is in place. These are essential health information for patient safety purposes and will be available to the attending medical team to ensure safe care.

•         In the event of a medical emergency that threatens the life or health of the patient, healthcare providers may override access restrictions. This enhances speed and quality of care, which is critical during medical emergencies. It is also a feature in jurisdictions such as Finland, Australia and Hong Kong which have national health repositories similar to NEHR.  

The enhanced access controls will be made available on the HealthHub application in the second half of 2026.

MOH will audit cases where your access restriction is overridden by the healthcare professional. Healthcare professionals who inappropriately override access restrictions to NEHR may be subject to legal penalties under the HIB and disciplinary action from the respective professional bodies, such as the Singapore Medical Council.

What happens after an access restriction is placed?

If you restrict access to your NEHR, your doctor will not be able to access them, even to provide care to you.

While healthcare professionals will be blocked from accessing your NEHR, the background contribution of selected health information to NEHR will continue. This ensures that there will be no gaps in your NEHR if you choose to remove the access restriction in future.

Additionally, this ensures that you will receive appropriate care during emergency situations when there is a need to override the restrictions.

Today, you can already check the NEHR Access History in HealthHub, to see if your NEHR have been accessed.

If you wish to restrict access, more details on the opt-out process is available in the FAQs by Synapxe.

How we prevent improper access and use of NEHR information

The HIB also has safeguards in place to govern the safe access, collection and use of NEHR information. These safeguards include:

•         Penalties to deter unauthorised or improper access of NEHR information

•         Healthcare providers and their authorised personnel may only access the NEHR information of patients registered with them.

•         Only personnel directly involved in patient care are granted NEHR access. Healthcare providers are also required to update NEHR when the roles of their authorised personnel change.

• Accessing NEHR information for employment or insurance purposes, will be disallowed.

MOH will also be able to direct healthcare providers and their authorised personnel to take corrective actions such as stopping unauthorised access and use of NEHR, and destroying health information collected in an unauthorised manner.

NEHR has safeguards to protect against cyber-attacks

A comprehensive set of security measures and processes protect the NEHR against cyberattacks. On top of that, both system operator‘s and users’ access are regularly audited and subjected to vulnerability scans and penetration tests to ensure strict compliance with security standards for government-owned systems.  

Additionally, systems that are required to connect to NEHR undergo a robust onboarding process to ensure that they have met the appropriate connectivity and security requirements before they are allowed to connect to NEHR.