IT boosts efficiency of northern hospital

A major hospital in Chiang Mai that provides healthcare services for people in the mountainous areas of the North is winning awards for its efforts to improve its services by adopting information technology.

The Maharaj Nakhon Chiang Mai Hospital - commonly known as Suandok Hospital - is the biggest tertiary hospital in northern Thailand, serving more than 2,500 outpatients per day, or more than a million patients per year.

Its efforts to upgrade the quality of its public health services earned Suandok Hospital a Public Services Award from the Office of the Public Sector Development Commission last year, and this year it has won a United Nations Public Service Award for improving the delivery of healthcare services.

The hospital's director, Watana Navacharoen, said Suandok Hospital had earlier faced many problems relating to its services, such as disease complications and long waiting time for treatment.

Three years ago it set up a hospital quality improvement team to achieve its vision "to be loved and trusted by our clients". As a guiding principle, the team promoted the motto: "we take care of you as a member of our family and serve you with our hearts".

The hospital has employed information technology to create an integrated system for managing patients' medical data to eliminate errors and improve the speed of its services. Importantly, the Suandok Medical Information system - as it is called - caters for the efficient provision of one-stop services.

These days, Suandok Hospital has reduced waiting time for health services and increased patient satisfaction as a result. All processes have been streamlined, including registration, laboratory, x-ray and pharmacy services and billing. Paper use for routine tasks has been reduced.

The one-stop service has dramatically reduced patients' waiting time. In 2005, patients attending the hospital had to wait for an average two hours and 20 minutes. Last year, average waiting time was down to one hour and 18 minutes.

"This is due to the large number of patients requiring services each day, complicated administrative and hospital procedures and language barriers - especially in communicating with hilltribe patients or immigrant workers," Watana explained.

Suandok Hospital also allows patients to make appointments to see its doctors via the Internet, before they visit the hospital. Patients seeking an appointment supply their ID number and the hospital sends an appointment time by short messaging system (SMS), once again helping to minimise patient waiting time.

The new IT system not only provides for individual patient registration at http://suandok.med.cmu.ac.th/main/index.php, but also creates an online-patient registration and referral system for other hospitals, though collaborative networking. A call centre links to a healthcare network covering hospitals in eight provinces, caring for a population of 12 million. Suandok Hospital is currently linked to three collaborative networks for emergency and tertiary healthcare.

Online patients are able to remotely check their health, and doctors in remote areas are able to consult specialists at Suandok Hospital. Remote hospitals can send laboratory results or electrocardiographs for analysis via SMS or facsimile, increasing the speed of access to medical services, reducing administrative steps, increasing efficiency and reducing costs.

"We want to provide fast and accurate services to improve healthcare, as well as promoting the well-being of Thai people, so that they can contribute to the development of the country," Watana said.