In November 2017, it was announced that the government would introduce legislation in 2018 to mandate all private doctors to submit patient information for the centralised national healthcare database named National Electronic Health Records System (NEHR). Patients can request for their health records to be made inaccessible to physicians and healthcare workers, but the records will still be added and updated to the electronic system. While the authorities have asserted that only relevant healthcare workers will have access to the patients' data, it was noted that there have been cases of illegal access of patients' records from outside Singapore even with the privacy safeguards in place.