Health4Us
Together for better health
Import & Export of Technology
Thailand has shown the lack of healthcare innovation for low income individuals. Part of this problem is due to the 30-baht policy in which the government has the full control over the decision. The complicated steps and political involved has discouraged the entrepreneurs to invent the innovation in healthcare as well as adapt current technology to match the usage in medical industry.
The data has shown tat the local production has been declined in 2011 and stable around $90,000. Almost all of the medical devices in Thailand are from the imports, mainly from United States. Moreover, most of the importers are Thai which shown that Thai business has focus on foreign technology rather than Thai innovation.
World's technology has been developed and it improves the quality and time usage for healthcare as well as blending with everyday life. However, Thailand's technology is by far behind the developed country in terms of adaptation and usage. Thai people is still using the traditional way of taking care of health and visit the doctors while the developing country has started to set the trend in telemedicine and online tools as well as applications to monitor and keep their health in check. These technologies are not popular among Thai people.
Furthermore, new innovation in Thailand tends to be focusing on the premium market rather than the mass market. For example, A-Knife is a technology which could replace the trigger finger with the piercing with is more effective and reduces a lot of resources usage.
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Technology Trend
The innovation of A-Knife has been used mostly in private hospital which charge very premium price. It has been used in very few of public hospital and the reason it has been used is because it belongs to the universities who research on the products or having strong relationship with the inventors. Therefore, researchers and entrepreneurs are discouraged to develop the innovation in healthcare as it has low potential to bring it to the mass market.
This ratio indicates the improvement of the future trend of innovations to reach all people rather than focusing on certain group of people. We expect this percentage to improve believing that the medical treatment is for everyone, and entrepreneurs would benefit more from making their innovations reach through more people rather than a small portion. However, such ratio has not been researched thoroughly yet.
Interesting Metric
Percentage of hospitals/medical center that are behind the standard treatment
We aims to make the technology of medical treatment catching up with the standard treatment. The hospitals in the rural area are the major in lacking behind in medical equipment to have a quality treatment.
This metric also shows the opportunity of bringing the medical treatment in niche market to mass as well.
Technology Development for Healthcare
The global market research has shown the need of patience and the technology improvement to response to those needs. People believe that the technology could help deliver the diagnosis result faster, and allowed the doctors to access to the data faster. They also expected the reduction in queuing time as well. Thus, we could infer from the need that the people have high expectation for technology to play important roles in changing the way healthcare is.