Over the past 35 years, our doctors and staff have created an enduring brand that draws patients from all over Thailand and around the world to receive effective treatment in a comfortable and caring environment. The future of this brand depends strongly on what the 3,276 outpatients and 96 inpatients who leave our hospitals each day tell their family, friends and colleagues.
What we do to satisfy our patients is incorporate differentiation into our medical services and standards that sets us apart from other health care providers. Thailand as a country now provides capable medical services from many institutions and strong competition exists in the market. Bumrungrad International Hospital focuses at the apex of tertiary care within the private hospital sector and our differentiation strategy is comprised of three key elements.
The first element is the strength and expertise of our doctors who work together as a team. We have over 1,300 doctors with the majority having international board certifications from the USA or other countries with very developed medical standards. Many patients come to us to seek out these doctors either on an individual basis or as a team to address very complicated cases. This collaboration of expertise allows for better treatments and outcomes for the patient and helps us build on our nearly 100 subspecialties of focus.
For example we opened our Newlife Healthy Aging Clinic earlier this year bringing advanced treatments and methods to effectively care for elderly patients. This requires a collaboration of expertise. For example, falls and dizziness in an elderly patient could come from many underlying reasons: the inner ear, the circulatory system, musculoskeletal weakness or the brain itself. It’s important to possess the necessary expertise for the effective diagnosis and treatment of the specific disease. The ability and practice of our doctors to work effectively as a team is part of our long standing culture and a key reason for our success in treating complicated cases.
A second element is the incorporation of the appropriate application of technology in the hospital. It is important to strike a balance between implementing a leading technology and waiting for enough confirmation of data to prove a technology. In the case of Watson for Oncology which successfully began being part of treatment process for individuals this year for certain types of cancer, we determined the technology of using cognitive computing to research clinical data and help recommend the best treatment based on the individual patient’s clinical condition was essential to providing the best care for cancer patients. Bumrungrad was the first adopter of this technology and expects this platform to be a key component in the expertise of our Cancer Center.
The third element is the continuous improvement of our quality and safety systems in the hospital. We continually strive to increase the capabilities of our systems in the hospitals, and besides the international accreditations over the entire hospital such as JCI, we have also pursued targeted improvements aimed at individual systems in the hospital. A recent example of this was the recognition by Westgard Sigma certifying Bumrungrad as the first laboratory in Thailand to be certified to world-class standards of accuracy, ensuring that results are error-free.
The strength of our systems was put to the test in June 2015 when Thailand had its first MERS patient who came to Bumrungrad for treatment. Our doctors and nursing team had the training and experience to accurately assess the risk based on the patient symptoms and travel history and was able to successfully isolate the patient which ultimately prevented the transmission of this virus locally. Both the hospital and Thailand were able to quickly recover from what could have become a critical situation impacting local residents as well as international patients who come to Thailand seeking medical care. It is our strong combination of people and systems that propel the hospital to these levels of quality and patient safety and we will continue to improve this further.
We saw our inpatient census climb to record numbers towards the end of 2015 reflecting a trend of bringing in patients with more complicated conditions. Our average length of stay went up by more than 9% while our inpatient days climbed 11%. Given our location in a dense urban setting, planning for facility expansion takes time and often requires several steps. In late 2015 we moved all office staff out of the Bumrungrad Residence building to fully renovate the structure for additional clinical space. This will free up more space from the hospital and clinic buildings so that we can add more capacity accordingly and will continue to plan for additional expansion.
The results of our efforts are being recognized by organizations within Thailand and around the globe. We once again received an award from the American Chamber of Commerce for our CSR excellence, with our Rak Jai Thai program. We also received a Best Employer Award from the Ministry of Labour for the fifth year in a row.
Mr. Dennis Brown
Corporate CEO
