Siriraj spends Bt200m on hospital Info system

"It is the first major software investment by Siriraj Hospital in the past 10 years, as the hospital had been developing solutions by itself system by system, leading to problems in managing the hospital's information," said Viroje Chongkolwatana, deputy dean of information technology at Siriraj Hospital's Faculty of Medicine and project manager.

"Normally, we don't have a specific software investment budget as we do in-house development. This [new] investment is outside Siriraj's annual IT investment budget [hardware, networking and security] of about Bt150 million to Bt200 million," said Viroje.

The new investment covers implementation of the Enterprise Healthcare Information System (EHIS) provided by the Australian-based IBA Health Group's iSOFT Thailand. Full implementation is scheduled to take one year.

The EHIS at the 121-year-old hospital comprises five main modules: patient administration system (PAS) and billing, pharmacy, clinical and maternity, blood bank and dental.

These modules have been divided into three phases.

The first is the PAS and blood bank, which was implemented last month.

The second - covering clinical and maternity, and dental - is scheduled to go live in September.

The billing system will be implemented by year-end in the final phase.

"The project will completely go live early next year after the entire project's implementation is completed by the end of this year," said Viroje.

The EHIS will encourage the hospital to develop further electronic systems, such as e-medicine ordering and e-patient records, and provide better healthcare services to patients with greater accuracy.

Viroje said Siriraj's hospital information system was very large scale, as it had to cover 3 million outpatients and 80,000 inpatients per year and an average daily workload of 10,000 outpatients. The system also involves 1,200 doctors and 12,000 hospital staff.

Siriraj's current databases are located separately and not linked, slowing the hospital down when it comes to disbursement through funds like the Social Security Office, the National Health Security Office and the Comptroller-General's Department.

"iSOFT's EHIS will make overall management easier for us, because it is a Web-based system supporting the large scale of concurrent use and supporting integration with other organisations. If we perform better, our patients will benefit and receive better services that are 30-40-per-cent faster," said Viroje.

iSOFT Asia president and CEO Wim Botermans said landing the largest hospital as its first customer in Thailand had led the company to establish a representative office - iSOFT Thailand - in Bangkok, with 50 local staff. This is its second-largest operation in Asia after Malaysia, which employs 220 people.

"We have been here three years, but were known as IBA Health (Thailand). Australia's IBA Heath Group acquired UK-based iSOFT in October 2007, and we come back to Thailand now with our first large deal, with Siriraj Hospital," said Botermans.

He said the global economic crisis had had little effect on the healthcare industry, especially regarding the government's healthcare budget.

Research firm Gartner said Asia's healthcare industry was expected to grow by 5-10 per cent this year, with the industry's IT spending normally 10-15 per cent of its overall investment budget per year.

"Asia is the important market for us, with around 60 per cent of the world's population. More people means a greater need for healthcare," said Botermans.

He said the company planned to win contracts with one or two more large Thai public hospitals this year for a similar level of investment to that of Siriraj Hospital.

Normally, 80-90 per cent of company revenue in Asia is from public hospitals, with 10-20 per cent coming from private operators.

(Published on March 20, 2009 in The Nation Newspaper)