National Registry of Diseases Office

The National Registry of Diseases Office (NRDO) was set up by the Ministry of Health in 2001 to collect data on selected major diseases and health conditions in Singapore. NRDO says the information is used to understand how conditions evolve and to support national public-health policies, healthcare services and programmes (NRDO, About NRDO, accessed 8 September 2026).

Registries and reporting role

NRDO currently manages four registries for common diseases: cancer, chronic kidney failure, stroke, and acute myocardial infarction or heart attack. Its role is to collect and maintain data on reportable conditions that have been diagnosed and treated in Singapore, publish reports, and provide evidence for policy and service planning. The registries are disease-specific information systems, not a general population-statistics database (NRDO, About NRDO, accessed 8 September 2026; NRDO, FAQs, accessed 8 September 2026).

The four-registry list is a scope boundary: it does not mean NRDO maintains a registry for every condition or that a condition absent from its publications is absent from Singapore. The relevant registry report remains the authoritative place to check its case definition and coverage (NRDO, About NRDO, accessed 8 September 2026).

How data is collected and managed

NRDO registry coordinators identify cases from notifications by healthcare professionals and hospital medical records, verify and extract relevant information, and enter it into the registry database. Data-management staff validate and anonymise the collected data before analysts, including epidemiologists and biostatisticians, use it to produce reports on incidence, mortality and other disease trends. NRDO also describes a quality-assurance function that checks approval levels and whether releases follow the National Registry of Diseases Act. The operational description explains the registry workflow; it does not mean that every medical record is publicly released (NRDO, About NRDO, accessed 8 September 2026).

NRDO says analysts produce reports regularly for MOH and may also produce aggregated data for media queries and research projects. That reporting function is separate from the clinical decisions made by hospitals and clinicians treating an individual patient (NRDO, About NRDO, accessed 8 September 2026).

Legal basis and privacy boundary

The National Registry of Diseases Act allows NRDO to access medical information and collect data on specified health conditions. NRDO describes four safeguards in the Act’s framework: coverage of reporting across healthcare sectors, control over the amount and type of information collected, protection of privacy and data security, and clarity about information use (NRDO, Legislation, accessed 5 September 2026).

NRDO publishes aggregate disease trends and accepts requests for non-identifiable or key-coded data under its data-request process. Its FAQ says simply aggregate requests generally aim for a three-week turnaround, while more complex requests may take up to eight weeks; certain potentially identifiable elements, including date of birth, diagnosis date and admission date, are not released. These are published process boundaries, not a guarantee that every request will be approved or completed within the target (NRDO, FAQs, accessed 5 September 2026).

Relationship to other health information

NRDO is a disease-registry office within the Ministry of Health system, not a replacement for SingStat, a clinical record portal, or a general-purpose public-health dashboard. NRDO is not a clinical provider: it does not diagnose or treat an individual patient. Its published outputs are organised around the four named registries and the conditions they cover. A number in a registry report therefore needs to be read with that report's case definition, geography, treatment setting, reference population and observation period. This distinction matters when comparing an NRDO incidence or mortality measure with a survey estimate, an administrative count, or a Ministry of Health service statistic (NRDO, About NRDO, accessed 8 September 2026; NRDO, Publications, accessed 8 September 2026).

Publications and interpretation

NRDO’s publications page, current on 4 September 2026, lists the Singapore Myocardial Infarction Registry Annual Report 2023, the Singapore Cancer Registry Annual Report 2023, the Singapore Renal Registry Annual Report 2024, and earlier stroke and registry publications. Publication years refer to the data period covered by a report and should not be mistaken for the date on which the page was accessed or the date of every underlying case. Readers should use the report’s methodology and reference population when interpreting incidence, mortality or survival figures. A publication date is therefore not automatically the same as the data period (NRDO, Publications, accessed 8 September 2026).