By Siqi Chen (’16), Sawin Saibua (’16), Xunzhi Sun (’16), Sean Tang (’16), Jie Yang (’16)
To gain an insight on the current healthcare environment in Thailand, our AMR team made a trip to Bangkok over winter break. Our AMR project is to determine the most sustainable strategic approach for AEC Telemedicine Center Excellence (TCE) to launch a telemedicine hub in Southeast Asia. On this trip, we met with a variety of stakeholders within the telemedicine network, including major university hospitals, government agency, and technology vendors.
When it comes to the best healthcare expertise, the university hospitals are the most highly regarded for the general public in Thailand. We had the opportunities to talk with the top management and doctors from Siriraj and Chulalongkorn hospitals, the top two university hospitals. From all of the conversations, we learned the following facts:
- During regular working hours, doctors are overloaded with patients that are coming from inside and outside Bangkok and do not have any time to take on additional cases that may be referred through tele services.
- To fully transform diagnosis into digital format, some of the doctors’ habit needs to be changed. For example, Thai pathologists prefer to see tissue slides through microscopes as opposed to digital images.
- Almost all doctors in the public hospitals work in the private sector during their off-hours.
The key success in building a sustainable telemedicine business is to reach enough users that can make the business profitable. At the early stage of the project before it can acquire enough traffic volume, financial support from the government will be crucial to its success. Moreover, if the government agencies become the champion for such telemedicine venture, other public and private institutions will be more willing to join in the network. For these reasons, we approached Thailand National Science Technology and Innovation Office (NSI). NSI carries out the research and development of the country’s policies in the field of science and technology. Here are the findings from our conversation with NSI:
- The Thai government’s goal for a telemedicine network is to improve overall healthcare of Thailand’s citizens, and to establish Thailand as a medical hub of AEC.
- The proposed project needs to comprise of innovative technology and service. This innovative technology does not need be complicated. It only needs to efficiently solve the problem, create the impact and have a proof of concept.
TCE does not intend to be the key developer of telemedicine technology. Instead, it wants to identify the best-of-breed technologies in the market, partner with the vendors, and aggregate these technologies into an integrated telemedicine platform. During our Thailand trip, we met with top executives from two technology providers, Datexim and General Electronic Commerce Services Co., Ltd (“GEC”). The former is a French vendor of digital pathology, and the latter is a local developer of technology for electronic supply chain management which can be applied to telemedicine. In these two meetings, we learned about the details of their technologies, pricing models, current markets they are serving, and motivations for entering the telemedicine market in Thailand and our takeaways are:
- The technology is mature and the costs are getting lower.
- The challenge to enter Thailand is to convince private clinics on the return on investment of telemedicine - cost savings, efficiency increase, and quality improvements.
- Technology is not a barrier in connecting different healthcare providers and transmitting medical information, and it takes them fewer than 6 months to set up a new system as long as the business concept is clear.
The Thailand trip gave our team a big leap forward in our project, as we got a far clearer picture of the healthcare system in Thailand, the general environment and sentiment for telemedicine, and the potential opportunities and challenges for different service models.
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