Bumrungrad targets asian leadership on safety, trust

Dubbed the No-1 private hospital in Thailand, Bumrungrad is pursuing its goal through the deployment of a corporate-performance management system; the formation of a strategy-management team; constant evaluation with help from all parties including marketing and sales teams; and knowledge leveraging with IT is the main tool.

"IT is the tool connecting the back and the front office, so information can be sent to all involved," said Apichart Sivayathorn, Bumrungrad's quality director.

While patients' data, their medical records, laboratory results, medical bills and records of the personnel are stored in the main system, the hospital has an auxiliary system called the "Y-Drive" where all departments can put additional information like their financial performance or the results of customer satisfaction surveys.

This information will then be reviewed on a monthly basis by the strategy-management team, though patients' complaints will be dealt with on a daily basis. All information will then be passed on to employees through online documents and the bulletin board.

This information will also be used to develop training programmes to help address problems.

According to Apichart, this ex-change of information would help the hospital improve its performance on a regular basis.

For example, the safe usage of medication, which is one of the eight elements of its patient safety goal, is improved upon continuously since the subset was inititially put in place five years ago.

While in the first year, Bumrungrad focused solely on the standardisation of drug concentrations, the next year it added the concentrations of high-alert medications, and plans to add more over the following years.

"Some goals must be continued and we will obviously see success.

"In this regard, we have witnessed a continuous drop in faulty medication," Apichart said.

According to the quality director, the information is clear enough for everyone to understand, even physicians who have been trained as doctors but are respected enough by their peers to be put in the management team.

However, doctors need leadership training.

"It may not be that easy to change them, but it's not that difficult either.

"Certainly, some doctors joined Bumrungrad to make money, but once they have accumulated enough, they opt for public acceptance and doing something good for the patients.

"That's when we ask them to join the management team," said Apichart.