Article
As one of the largest private hospitals in Southeast Asia and a magnet for medical tourists from around the world, Bumrungrad International Hospital has a strong reputation for excellence in patient care. Based in Bangkok, the hospital provides services across more than 70 medical subspecialties to over 1.1 million patients from 190 countries annually.
With such a high volume of patients coming through its doors every year, Bumrungrad manages one of the busiest clinical labs of any private hospital in Thailand. To keep up with growing demand and also power a new range of cutting-edge healthcare offerings, Bumrungrad has ambitious plans to build out a “next-generation lab” with advanced equipment, information technologies and business processes.
To learn more about these plans, the Lab Insights team recently spoke with Jeremy Ford, Director of Laboratory, Research and Technology at Bumrungrad.
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Ford’s vision for the next-generation lab
A clinical scientist with roughly 40 years of experience in lab research and management, Ford acts as a strategic advisor to the both Bumrungrad’s executive management team and the personnel in charge of the lab’s day-to-day operations. Working in close collaboration with the R&D department, he supports translational research and product development across both the clinical lab and various other departments that are driving the hospital’s digital transformation.
Some of Ford’s efforts are focused on digitisation of clinical lab processes. Both the core and the microbiology labs are already completely paperless, and he expects that the molecular lab, histopathology department and blood bank will be either paper-light or paper-free in near future. He is also helping to implement a complete digital pathology workflow, including annotation of images to support the application of AI for diagnostic decision support.
Ford sees even greater automation, consolidation and integration on the horizon. “Within the next decade, we will be fully automated and completely robotic, with every analyzer on a single track in just one or a couple of rooms,” he says. “All instruments in the central lab and at the point-of-care will be one-hundred percent interoperable and link digitally to the patient record.”
In the coming years, Ford also anticipates the widespread rollout of medical-grade wearables that monitor patients in real time, continuously and non-invasively. He believes that the clinical lab can play an important role in collecting and integrating the data from these wearables, and is helping to create the digital infrastructure to make that possible within the hospital.
Personalised medicine, wellness and the “digital twin”
Beyond driving new operational efficiencies in clinical care, Bumrungrad’s next-generation lab will also enable an entirely new suite of personalised medicine and preventative wellness services that aim to drive superior health outcomes for their patients and customers.
“The organisation is very focused on integrative care, bringing the wellness concept as an adjunct to our clinical practice,” observes Ford. “We’ve had a wellness practice for over 20 years, making us one of the pioneers in the region and putting us way ahead of our competitors.”
The hospital intends to apply the same scientific standards to their wellness services as they do in clinical medicine. This means ensuring that wellness-related procedures and interventions, such as toxic metal screening services or dietary supplement recommendations, are validated by peer-reviewed academic literature.
It also means driving greater personalisation in how laboratory values are interpreted. “We want to look beyond the concept of normal ranges and find out what’s truly optimal for the individual,” says Ford. “Lots of people think that wellness is a matter of simply wearing an Apple watch and measuring vitals, but it’s so much more than that.”
To help achieve this vision, Bumrungrad has the capacity to build detailed digital profiles of its customers. This profile, which they refer to as a “digital twin,” is based on diverse datasets—including genomic profiles, clinical records and real-time data from wearables—that grow with a customer over time. This enables the hospital to assess genetic risks and run medical simulations that support preventative care and treatment selection at the individual level.
The ultimate goal: superior patient experience
The innovations happening in Bumrungrad’s clinical lab are part of a broader transformation agenda that seeks to make its medical and wellness services more convenient, accessible and patient friendly.
Some key pillars of this agenda include investments in a sophisticated new contact center with advanced chat functionalities; telemedicine capabilities for both primary and specialty care; and home care services that include consultations, nursing care, vaccinations, medicine delivery, at-home sample collection and other offerings.
Bringing all these capabilities together into a single patient experience requires seamless integration between the clinical lab and the hospital’s broader digital infrastructure. To participate in these changes, lab professionals need to prepare for new paradigms of work.
“As more of our workflows and analytics become automated, lab staff will need to shift their focus from the bench and build new skills,” says Ford. “They will need a greater understanding of data and technology, and a deeper orientation towards service and process optimisation.”
