To understand what shapes Thai Electronic Medical Records Systems, I will first introduce the main force that shapes everything: the one who pays the bill. Thai Medical Systems are divided into two separate hospital types | Government Hospitals (including local medical centers in some distant areas that lack sufficient budget) and Private Hospitals.
For Private sector hospitals, there are three simplified types of payment. The first is through health insurance, the second is pre-packaged plans, and the third is full payment (sometimes with promotional discounts). We’ll revisit this later if you’re interested in it.
For Government sector hospitals, we can divide them by the organizations that pay the bills. The first and most privileged one is the State Civil Officer Health Welfare (OFC) or Civil Servant Medical Benefit Scheme (CSMBS). The second is Social Security (SSO), which is deducted from office workers’ salaries every month. The last and largest one is Universal Health Coverage (UHC), formerly known as the 30 Baht Project.
There are other kinds of payment coverage for veteran and disability welfare, but compared to these three, they are very small in number. In this article, we will focus only on the government sectors.
Universal Health Coverage is the largest part of Thai citizens’ medical coverage rights, managed by an organization called the NHSO. Most government sector hospitals prepare the documents and send the Electronic Medical Records compiled to them. Sadly, this system does not have an open API and still mostly depends on Windows and Internet Explorer compatibility.
In the next article, we will take a closer look at how this system actually works, and point out the strengths and weaknesses inside it.