With over 30% of the diagnostic laboratory market in Thailand and a growing presence in Myanmar and Cambodia, N Health [1] is a regional market leader with solid financials and an established reputation. It is also pursuing new ventures that aim to drive further growth and ensure the company adapts to future market needs.

Many of these ventures will position the company to play a more direct role in patient care and enhance its overall value for healthcare systems, according to Narongrid Galaputh, N Health’s Managing Director. They leverage the company’s diverse capabilities in laboratory services, supply chain management, infection control and biomedical engineering, as well as the hospital and retail operations of its parent company, Bangkok Dusit Medical Services (BDMS).

The journey to market leadership

N Health began as an in-house services division of BDMS, Thailand’s largest private hospital group, where Galaputh also holds a position as CEO of Non-Hospital Services. After joining the firm roughly twelve years ago, he immediately set out to transform its lab unit and revitalise its business model.

“When I started with BDMS, our lab belonged only to the hospital, and our equipment and processes were spread out across multiple locations,” says Galaputh. “Having a background in supply chain management, I wanted to build scale, and started by consolidating our many labs into one entity under N Health.”

This consolidation helped N Health better serve its parent company, which today runs over 40 hospitals across six different brands in Thailand and Cambodia. It also helped N Health to begin offering laboratory services to other providers in the public sector, as well as to launch entirely new businesses that enable closer contact with patients and clinicians.

One of these new businesses is a B2C laboratory service that allow patients to make appointments online and come directly to N Health labs to get their tests. “We want customers to come into our lab to ask questions and get engaged,” says Galaputh. “Most of our results are still used primarily by doctors, but we offer a mobile application that lets patients check their lab results and access health content.”

N Health also runs pharmacies, which it uses as a channel for patient engagement and delivery of lab services, as well as “Health at Home”, a home nursing care operation that does specimen collection services and lab tests for patients with disabilities.

Galaputh’s vision for the future

Having already established N Health as a leader in Thailand’s laboratory services market, his new goal is to increase the visibility and value of its work by finding ways to engage more directly with patients, clinicians and other healthcare stakeholders.

“The ultimate value of diagnostics should be measure by its benefit for patients,” argues Galaputh. “Medical technologists really know a lot about patients, sometimes more even than doctors, so we have a clear opportunity to interact more with patients and increase the value of our work.”

Galaputh sees digital transformation as a means of attaining this goal. His company includes a Digital Efficiency (DE) department whose specific job is making sure it remains a leader in digital platforms. The department employs 25 people, most of whom have IT backgrounds, including 10 focused on infrastructure (the rest sit within N Health’s various business units).

Yet even with such a big internal team devoted to digital innovation, Galaputh acknowledges that external partnerships will be essential for continuing to build the technology capabilities to realise his broader business goals: “We should be talking about co-creation of value between technology owners and service providers that help us play a more central role in the patient experience. We are both on the same side of this critical battle.”

[1] N Health Healthcare Service Solutions