Interview: Dr Jinhatha Panyasorn – Facilitating the patient journey with AI

BDMS is one of the most well-known hospital networks in the Asia-Pacific region. What are the reasons you think the network is so trusted?

In putting domestic and international patients as the priority in the journey, the BDMS network is committed to delivering high-valued and quality comprehensive healthcare services in our network hospitals and other healthcare-related businesses. We earn accreditations and standards with renowned international organisations and affiliated institutions and committed to ensure corporate good governance and sustainability business development. As a result, BDMS is the first medical and healthcare business organisation in Thailand which was selected as a member of Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI) – Emerging Market since 2021.

How does BDMS manage the patient journey, making it as seamless as possible?

Patient centricity is the primary goal of BDMS. Today the patient journey is more distinct and patient-specific than it was in the past, particularly for patients with chronic or progressive disorders whose disease cycles frequently involve numerous interactions over a lengthy and multi-staged course. Therefore, effective communication, advanced care pathways and digital health technologies and solutions are completely intertwined elements in creating a seamless, streamlined process for both patients and hospitals. The integrated systems allow hospitals to provide care, education, and guidance to patients beyond the walls of the healthcare facility.

Tell us about how technology has changed how BDMS has worked over the last few years.

One of our strategic priorities over the last few years is the digital healthcare system. We have developed a customer-centric health ecosystem using teleconsultation, tele-pharmacy and healthmall, serving the patients’ needs and access to healthcare services. BDMS patients who live in remote places can now easily obtain medical care via telehealth technology. We adopted a smart healthcare concept to provide valuable services to achieve better patient care, experience and operational efficiency. For example, Artificial Intelligence (AI) assisted diagnosis has been implemented to provide more precise diagnosis. Recent innovative healthcare processes on monitoring technology have revealed beneficial effects on behavior modification, including medication adherence, physical activity as well as improved treatment outcomes such as decreased mortality for heart failure patients and improved blood pressure control for those with hypertension. By sending text messages or alerts through applications, patients will receive reminders in real time. Although there is no direct contact, patients still feel supported throughout their treatment.

How does BDMS help contain costs for patients and third-party payers?

Utilisation management (UM) policy has been effectively implemented in all BDMS network hospitals to reduce consumption of unnecessary healthcare services and thus helps contain cost. However, the difficulties are tied up in complicated and time-consuming review processes and human errors from data oversight, which have occurred frequently due to data overload. Moreover, the reviewers’ performance and accuracy of review results largely depend on the individual’s clinical knowledge and experience. An inexperienced UM nurse might not be able to prioritise work, and he/she might spend time on low-value tasks, making unnecessary use of resources and subsequently causing difficulties for the patient, the provider, and the payer.

The only way to overcome those problems is to do something differently. We, therefore, designed and internally developed an automated utilization review tool called the BDMS Utilization Review Technology (BURT) as a decision support application to detect inappropriate hospitalisation using AI and a rule-based approach. The implementation of BURT significantly reduces administrative burden, paperwork, cost and also supports decision making processes and assessment processing time performed by UM nurses, since it immediately captures all necessary data at their fingertips. The precision of review results is higher than those performed by humans who might occasionally miss crucial data. Moreover, BURT helps to expedite the claim process since it prioritizes cases that require attention and prompt actions, such as to improve quality of clinical information provided to payers or to clearly communicate to patients regarding unnecessary hospitalisation requests.

Tell us about the BDMS Insurance Management System and why it is so successful.

The BDMS Insurance Management System (IMS) is an innovative and comprehensive claims management system for hospitals. The system supports claim handling processes end-to-end: from the patient’s arrival through to financial discharge and billing process by integrating hospital information system and AI (BDMS Utilisation Review Technology) to analyse healthcare data, insurance policies, and manage insurance claim processes. It helps to improve the efficiency of claims by reducing document submission time and errors. IMS can also lessen risks such as insurance claim rejection, personal data leaks and shortening the time needed for claim handling. The IMS system received the first prize in the BDMS project competition in the innovation category and also earned the President`s Award in 2020. Currently, the BDMS Insurance Management System is compatible with the Domestic Insurance system which places claim data electronically and is interchanged through Application Programming Interface (API). It is planned to be extended to cover International Insurance claim handling process by 2024.