Technical Report: Exploring Digital Health and Telemedicine Practices: A Study Visit to Singapore

Thailand is in the process of adopting technologies appropriate for its context to provide telemedicine on a national scale. However, there are some gaps that make achieving universal telemedicine in Thailand challenging on certain areas. Technological factors and the lack of a uniform information system is a problem, e.g., administrators select their own information systems which are incompatible with regards to future use, data items, and versions. Additionally, the poor performance of internet connection made patient identification, automatic data recording, and record pulling processes sometimes quite slow.

To ensure successful implementation, it is imperative to strategically plan the next steps. Drawing insights from practical telemedicine experiences from other settings can be pivotal to avoiding repeating past errors. Therefore, a study visit to a country line Singapore, which has made strides in implementing telemedicine, was deemed essential to grasp their digital health service provisions and foster dialogue between Thai and Singaporean stakeholders.

This report summarises the sites visited during the study visit from 2nd to 4th August 2023, providing an overview of each site, key discussion points, and crucial insights relevant to Thailand’s context.