How Ren Ci eliminated paper-based visitor management — and built an access system that now handles 20,000 verifications a month across its care network

The Challenge

Visitor management built on paper — inflexible, error-prone, and increasingly risky

When Ren Ci first came to WerkDone, the community hospital was managing a high and constant flow of visitors — patients' families, volunteers, contractors, and clinical guests — using paper registers and manual reception processes. During COVID-19, public health guidelines changed repeatedly, and every update meant new forms, retraining staff, and additional administrative load on teams already stretched across care duties. The system had no flexibility and no audit trail worth the name.

The data risks were equally clear. Visitor records — holding personal identifiers, health declarations, and visit histories — sat in physical files without centralised access controls or reliable audit capability. Across Singapore's healthcare sector, data breaches were becoming more frequent, and manual systems with no encryption, no access logging, and no secure retrieval were an obvious liability for any institution holding sensitive information.

Digitising was not in question. The challenge was getting it right. Visitors to a community hospital span a wide range — elderly patients' family members, overseas contractors, regular volunteers — each with different languages, different levels of digital confidence, and different access requirements. A generic enterprise access tool would not hold up in this environment. Ren Ci needed a system built for the realities of community care.

The Solution

Self-service kiosks, intelligent gantries, and a platform built for healthcare-grade access control

WerkDone designed a Visitor Management System configured specifically for Ren Ci's operational environment. Multi-lingual self-service registration kiosks let visitors complete their own check-in without staff assistance — each with purpose-built pathways for different visitor categories. Families, contractors, volunteers, and clinical visitors all move through a flow calibrated to their visit type and security clearance. No paper. No queue at reception. No manual data entry.

At entry and exit, intelligent gantries handle contactless identity verification and capacity enforcement automatically. Visitor limits per patient, ward lockdowns, and access exceptions are managed by the system — not by staff judgment in the moment. More than 50 visitor categories are configured, each governed by its own rules, giving Ren Ci the granular access control that a complex, multi-ward facility requires.

A centralised management dashboard sits behind the front-end experience, giving staff secure, searchable access to all visitor records and real-time reporting. Data that previously existed only in physical form can now be retrieved instantly and supports PDPA-compliant audit requirements. At the community hospital alone, the system handles over 150 appointments daily and completes more than 20,000 identity verifications each month.

Following the community hospital deployment in 2023, the platform was extended to Ren Ci's nursing home branches in 2024 — including the newly opened Woodlands Nursing Home within the Woodlands Health Campus. The nursing home rollout incorporated additional capabilities suited to aged care: a digital Queue Management System and resident safety features for monitoring movement and managing access across the household-model wards. Each facility now runs on the same platform, with centralised oversight across the network.

As part of the Woodlands deployment, WerkDone also developed a senior-friendly resident engagement application — a tablet-based platform with gamified activities, family communication tools, and personalised scheduling. The app is scoped to Woodlands Nursing Home specifically, and reflects Ren Ci's intent to use technology to improve resident quality of life, not just operational efficiency.