Siriraj Hospital’s Comprehensive Digital Transformation Journey with the Support of Huawei
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Founded by King Chulalongkorn in 1888, Siriraj Hospital is Thailand’s largest public hospital and one of the largest in Southeast Asia. With a capacity of more than 2,000 beds, it is visited by more than 3 million patients a year seeking treatment. It also serves as a medical school that forms about 250 medical students and more than 100 postgraduate students annually.
Siriraj Hospital is highly regarded by Thai people as it was the residence of the late King Rama IX during his last seven years, until he passed away on October 13, 2016.
From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, Siriraj Hospital became the hub for the country’s fight against the virus, while continuing to offer medical services for other patients.
Facing limited human resources brought about by an aging population and financial challenges due to rising healthcare costs, Siriraj Hospital needed to introduce digital technologies to increase the efficiency of its services and operations, such as reducing the risk of hospital infection, managing the volume of patients and reducing patient waiting time.
In 2020, Siriraj Hospital selected Huawei as its strategic partner to design a comprehensive 5-year framework to transform itself into a smart hospital driven by 5G and Cloud technologies. Under the ‘Siriraj 5G Smart Hospital’ project, Huawei built an MEC-based 5G private network, a hybrid cloud and a 5G + Wi-Fi solution to utilize new medical applications.
• The MEC-based 5G private network is the foundation of smart applications. Traditional 4G networks cannot provide the adequate latency and security for accessing confidential local data over the Internet. In its fight against COVID-19, Siriraj Hospital turned to Cloud and AI-assisted diagnosis solutions, including computer vision and medical image analysis. Thanks to 5G network's high speed and accuracy, the process takes only 25 seconds per case. For the first time in Thailand, Siriraj Hospital also introduced 5G autonomous vehicles, enabling contactless delivery of medical supplies.
• Hybrid cloud, an integrated information system for all departments of Siriraj Hospital, enables data resource sharing and efficient collaboration between different applications. It also constitutes a solid foundation for the future development of 5G, Cloud, AI and Big Data in the hospital.
• 5G + Wi-Fi 6 combines the advantages of 5G and Wi-Fi 6 technologies, thanks to high-bandwidth and low-latency. Patients' medical information can be safely transmitted through the MEC platform and directly forwarded to the internal server without passing through the public network. Data classification ensures that all internal medical data remains within the hospital campus. Two user groups – the hospital staff group and the patient group - are defined by different service set identifiers (SSIDs) and authentication methods. The hospital staff group can access both internal and Internet services through 802.1x authentication, while the patient group can access only the Internet after authentication through the portal.
Outside China, Siriraj Hospital is now considered one of the most successful models for using 5G and Cloud technologies in the healthcare industry.
For this project, Huawei served as a cloud service provider and 5G network equipment supplier, deploying a dedicated 5G + Cloud ICT system to help Siriraj Hospital promote and verify more secure, high-performance, and easy-to-use smart medical applications.
Siriraj Hospital partnered with highly specialized local medical service developers and integrators that have been cooperating with the hospital for a long time. Huawei helped them finalize 5G integration and verification in its 5G Open Lab. In the future, Huawei plans to introduce these partners and their mature 5G medical applications to other hospitals in Thailand to replicate Siriraj Hospital's success.
As part of the "Thailand 4.0" strategy for digital transformation, this will advance Thailand's medical industry into the 5G era and help it achieve its goal to become the leading medical hub in Southeast Asia.