Eng Hock Marcus Ong
Professor Eng Hock Marcus Ong
ACCEPTING PHD STUDENTS
Faculty & Department
Office Of Research
Joint Appointments
Programme Director, Office of Research, Duke-NUS Medical School
Education
Master of Public Health, Virginia Commonwealth University, United States
Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Bio
- Prof Marcus Ong is a Senior Consultant and Clinician Scientist, at the Department of Emergency Medicine in Singapore General Hospital. He is also Director of the Health Services Research Institute (HSRI), Director of Health Services Research Center (HSRC), SingHealth Services; Professor and Director, Health Services and Systems Research (HSSR); Director, Prehospital and Emergency Research Center (PERC), Duke-NUS Medical School. Prof Ong also serves as Medical Director, Unit for Prehospital Emergency Care (UPEC) and Senior Consultant, Ministry of Health, Hospital Services Division. He is a current recipient of the NMRC Clinician Scientist Award. Finally he is Chairman, Pan Asian Resuscitation Outcomes Study (PAROS). He has spent his career balancing clinical, research, education and policy work.
- Over two decades as a clinician scientist and health services researcher, Prof Marcus Ong has pioneered research resulting in tangible healthcare benefits for Singapore as well as the Asia Pacific. Nationally, his research has been translated into policies (e.g. the Ministry of Health’s Prehospital Emergency Care 5-year plan) that benefit patients and has dramatically increased survival of patients with out-of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) by more than ten-fold over a 16 year period (from 2% in 2001 to 6.5% in 2016). Prof Ong’s research studies focus predominantly on pre-hospital emergency care, medical devices, data science and health services research. His research has addressed issues such as out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), improving ambulance deployment, acute myocardial infarction care and emergency care. He was a key member of the Lancet Commission on Sudden Cardiac Death which published a landmark paper in 2023.
- In addition, Prof Ong has worked relentlessly to improve healthcare on the national level. In his role as both a health services researcher and Medical Director of the Unit for Pre-hospital Emergency Care (UPEC), MOH, Prof Ong has the unique opportunity to supervise evidence-based implementation of the latest science in PEC in a world-class EMS ‘living’ laboratory. He currently oversees a $70 million 5 year plan to improve PEC in Singapore.
- Prof Ong has obtained more than S$64 million in research grants for his studies, which include data science, geospatial diseases mapping, clinical drug trials, resuscitation and cardiovascular sciences, pre-hospital emergency care, and biomedical engineering. He is the Principal Investigator for an international, multi-centre cohort study of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest across the Asia-Pacific. The PAROS study involves 16 countries across Asia-Pacific and has now enrolled over 200,000 patients since 2010 and published over 40 collaborative papers. Prof Ong has published more than 439 articles in international and local journals, such as Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, American Journal of Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, Resuscitation, Annals of Emergency Medicine, etc. Prof Ong has also patented inventions using Artificial Intelligence and Heart Rate Variability for risk prediction of acutely ill patients and cooling solutions for therapeutic hypothermia. The technology is currently being developed into bedside triage devices that can help in risk stratification of critically ill patients and he has spun-off two companies from these inventions.
- In 2014, Prof Ong started a Data Science team at SingHealth Health Services Research Center and has been building Data Science capability at SingHealth. He is the SingHealth Co-Principal Investigator of the $25M JARVIS AI Singapore Grand Challenge addressing diabetes, hypertension and hyperlipidemia. He is a leading proponent of Data Science in Healthcare in Singapore. Most recently he formed a multi-disciplinary COVID-SOS team supporting cluster and national modelling/simulation efforts. He received the National Awards (COVID 19) Commendation Medal Prime Minister’s Office Singapore in 2022 for his team’s effort supporting COVID modelling during the pandemic.
- Prof Ong received the Public Service Medal (Pingat Bakti Masyarakat) National Day Award in 2016 and was recognised with the Minister for Health Award (2018) for his outstanding leadership and accomplishments. He has been awarded the inaugural Ian G. Jacobs Award for International Group Collaboration to Advance Resuscitation Science in 2014 and the Keith Neely Outstanding Contribution to EMS Award in 2015 from the National Association of EMS Physicians (NAEMSP), USA, and the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Asian EMS Council in 2014. He has been awarded with the NMRC STaR award in June 2023.. He also leads a large capacity building project working with 5 countries in South East Asia funded by Temasek Foundation called the Prehospital Emergency Care-Systems Evaluation Tool (PEC-SET), which is in collaboration with the World Health Organisation.
Contact Information
Emergency Care
Health Services Research
Data Science
Artificial Intelligence
Medical Devices
- Emergency Medicine
- Prehospital Emergency Care
- Health Services Research
- Data Science/Artificial Intelligence
- Medical Devices: Technological development of Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
- Carbon cool suit for targeted temperature management