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Remote hospital’s ‘smart’ move to weather power outages
Koh Phangan Hospital saved millions in maintenance expenses after digitising network infrastructure.
THAILAND
Koh Phangan Hospital invested in a three-phase UPS system
When monsoons hit Thailand between July and October, Koh Phangan Hospital experiences electricity outages that cannot be resolved by generators. The health institution is located on the country’s most remote island in Surat Thani, whose only source of power is the main electrical grid on the mainland of Nakorn Sri Thammarat province.
These power surges pressure medical staff as they disrupt their medical treatment and patient care, Koh Phangan Hospital Director Dr. Worawut Puttanaporkrattana told Healthcare Asia.
“When the medical staff is overworked, they are more prone to human errors in their assessments, which can make a big difference in diagnosis and treatment,” he added.
These overloads and voltages also damaged expensive medical equipment and started fires in pharmacy rooms.
Uninterrupted power supply
Four years ago, the medical institution started to transition from a 30-bed hospital to operating as a “smart
We have seen a significant drop in power damage and disruptions to our equipment since the installation of the UPS system
hospital.” Currently, it is in the process of expanding to a 50-bed healthcare facility and purchasing advanced machines for digital transformation. Amongst the hospital’s priciest equipment are echocardiographic machines, a type of ultrasound scan that looks into heart and blood vessels, and exercise stress test treadmills, each costing THB1m.
To keep up with its expansion, Koh Phangan Hospital invested in a threephase uninterrupted power supply (UPS) system.
“We have seen a significant drop in the frequency of power damage and disruptions to our equipment since the installation of the intelligent UPS system,” said Puttanaporkrattana.
The UPS system, produced by Eaton, has an extended battery module function that matches the health institution’s IP address. The IP address will immediately activate an alarm and send a report when a power surge or outage occurs. It allows the hospital to remotely oversee and shut down the UPS across its network. When the hospital’s efforts to resolve power surges were hampered by the global health crisis, Puttanaporkrattana said they were able to reach Eaton, which travelled to their location despite stringent travel rules.
Compared to manual generators, UPS systems can power automatically and identify power grid disturbances as well as issues in power supply.
“The power supply needs to have a super load capacity and produce more power within the allowable variation in output voltage,” the hospital director pointed out.
“UPS systems with user-friendly interfaces that are easy to read and operate can help reduce errors in daily operations whilst those that use lithium-ion batteries have longer lifespans and take up significantly less space compared to traditional battery technologies. This not only frees up valuable space within medical facilities but also reduces the overall cost of operation,” Puttanaporkrattana said.
As cyberattacks pose threats to hospitals, Puttanaporkrattana advised that hospitals should also consider end-to-end cybersecurity services when buying a UPS system - from initial audit to an in-depth analysis of threat and vulnerability to life-cycle management.
Shorter waiting time
Koh Phangan Hospital’s daily patient footprint in its outpatient department (OPD) went up by 33% from about 150 patients in 2018 to 200 in 2019. The number of patient entries swelled to 350 in 2020 and peaked between 400 to 700 in 2021.
Currently, the daily patient traffic in the OPD is 200 to 300 patients, but Puttanaporkrattana believes their patient footfall will gradually increase as Thailand sees more visitors from the pandemic.
Even as the number of patients increase, waiting time and treatment durations have declined nearly 25% – from about one hour and 15 minutes to only under an hour.
ANALYSIS: HEALTHCARE COST Healthcare providers dodge cost pressures with single-specialty hospitals
Markets are experimenting with single-specialty care and ambulatory care centres.
SOUTHEAST ASIA
With healthcare spending continuing to rise, one way to limit cost is increase specialisation. The 2020 INSEAD study showed that Southeast Asia’s healthcare expenditure will grow to US$740b by 2025. Hospitals are coping with this by investing in single-specialty hospitals. TE Asia Healthcare Partners, for instance, established the ALTY Orthopaedic Hospital in Malaysia, which focuses on orthopaedic care.
Boston Consulting Group Partner, Anurag Agrawal sees single-specialty care as a way to combat cost pressures amidst international political conflict.
Agrawal said even as the reopening of borders revived elective surgeries and medical tourism, which were suspended during the pandemic, recessionary pressures and inflationary pressures could pose risks to healthcare providers’ operations.
“Some of the global conflicts that we see are their supply chain disruptions and these have persisted since COVID-19 times, as economies have boomed and as demand has come back, the supply chains and global value chains have been phenomenal,” said Agrawal, who has 13 years of experience in healthcare consulting across Southeast Asia, the US, Europe, and India.
Ambulatory care centres
Aside from single-specialty care, he said tapping ambulatory care centres can also help mitigate cost issues.
“We see [health] providers experimenting more with ambulatory care and with single-specialty care, which allows providers to mitigate the full cost of serving patients in a tertiary care facility and ensures that patients can still be served within the same quality but in a step-down or in a facility, which provides similar care, but at a significantly controlled cost,” explained Agrawal.
An example of ambulatory care
Single-specialty care is a way to combat cost pressures
Anurag Agrawal
Ann Aerts
Digital healthcare isn’t replacing established systems, but enabling hybrid experiences
centres was adopted by Tan Tock Seng Hospital in Singapore, where they used these daycare surgery centres to conduct elective surgeries that were halted during the pandemic. It allowed them to provide elective surgeries in ambulatory care centres whilst attending to COVID-19 patients in their main hospital.
“Patients would perhaps want to visit healthcare facilities only for the most severe ailments but would want to visit the local ambulatory care setting for some of the relatively minor ailments,” said Agrawal.
Phygital to move forward
During the pandemic, Agrawal underscored the shift from traditional healthcare treatment to digitisation.
“The first of which is a change in care models. Traditionally, healthcare has been delivered in hospitals. It has been delivered physically in person with doctors interacting with patients. What COVID has done is, once it has moved this physical healthcare towards virtual or I would say phygital healthcare, a mix of physical and digital,” he said.
Another consultancy group, Bain & Company, found that telehealth adoption in the Asia-Pacific region has doubled since 2019.
But Agrawal said massive uptake in digital health has “tempered down,” allowing a shift in physical and digital or phygital healthcare treatment.
On digital healthcare, Dr. Ann Aerts, Head of non-profit group, Novartis Foundation, cited the best practices of Singapore where “digital and data infrastructure is welldeveloped,” said Aerts.
“That’s a big, big strength because many other countries are still lagging behind,” Aerts added.
She also underscored how the government in the Lion City required healthcare professionals to comply with online training on telehealth consultations and services.
In 2020, the Ministry of Health in Singapore offered a telemedicine course to guide doctors on delivering telehealth services, which will focus on patient safety.
The latest study from Bain & Company showed that more than 90% of consumers in Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore are seeking a single touchpoint to coordinate their healthcare needs in 2021.
Whilst the digital expectation is being served by primary care markets in China and Indonesia, some consumers in Singapore still want physical clinic visits.
“In these markets, digital healthcare isn’t replacing established systems, but rather, it’s enabling more connected, hybrid experiences,” Bain & Company said.
