Advertisement
Thailand’s free healthcare system is overworking its doctors. Can AI alleviate the burden?
- Doctors are working overtime to ease the caseload as a result of people taking advantage of free healthcare services in Thailand, industry players say
- Entrepreneurs have created AI-based platforms to ease overcrowding in hospitals, and help improve medical literacy in illnesses among the public
Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
1
Su-Lin Tanin Singapore
Thailand’s universal free healthcare system may be the envy of many in the Asia-Pacific region, but it is overworking staff and doctors, and forcing medical workers to leave the industry as entrepreneurs turn to technology for solutions to ease the caseload burden.
Advertisement
With little triaging of illnesses or minimal health education for the public, hospitals and clinics are swamped with patients with minor illnesses who severely tax an under-resourced public medical system, according to the entrepreneurs.
These are just some of the many problems in the poorly administered system reeling from the impact of the country’s political instability, they say.
A number of entrepreneurs are using artificial intelligence-enabled technology to solve the manpower crisis. Among their AI-enabled solutions is the creation of online screening by “online doctors” and health education.
Former Thai neurosurgeon Navaporn Nalita was so incensed by the deaths of two severely overworked colleagues that she quit her job to build an AI-based system that hospitals could use to automate screening and diagnosis.
Advertisement
Pitching her month-old technology called “Eidy” to investors at the Echelon X conference in Singapore on May 15-16, she recounted how her colleagues – who were in their 20s – died in road accidents after having worked hundreds of hours each month without a break.
Advertisement