Thailand: shifting from reactive to preventative healthcare with AI analytics

The fundamentals of healthcare have changed. Trends once viewed as potential disruptors have become the new standard in healthcare delivery. As healthcare providers build flexible technology infrastructures to succeed in the modern health system, growing complexities threaten the drive for smarter health.

To overcome such complexities, one of Asia-Pacific’s largest hospital networks, Bangkok Dusit Medical Services (BDMS), and leading researchers at Thailand’s King Mongkut Institute of Technology Ladkrabang (KMITL), have partnered with SparkBeyond to lead the shift from reactive to preventative healthcare using AI analytics. AI-powered automated analytics is a productivity game-changer: it seamlessly integrates billions of data points (both internal and external) to extract maximum value and deliver actionable insights.

The key to shifting to preventative healthcare is understanding why diseases occur – which would then enable effective and early intervention, help drive down costs, and enhance patient health with more personalized, smarter, data-driven care.

This exciting collaboration will initially see KMITL researchers apply SparkBeyond’s AI-powered problem-solving technology onto BDMS’s massive constellation of various data points, to identify unseen drivers of a number of complex diseases, improve our understanding of disease and aid in drug discovery.

SparkBeyond’s platform uses AI to bypass human bias and cognitive bottlenecks in problem-solving, generating millions of hypotheses per minute to brainstorm solutions and reveal root causes.  “If we want to improve the health of the people, we must do two things, know better and act earlier,” said Dr. Chaiyos Kunanusont, Director of Bangkok Health Research Center, Bangkok Dusit Medical Services (BDMS) PLC.  “To know better, we have to make use of available data to understand the natural history of illness, particularly predictors of ill-health.  This will enable us to act earlier thus prevent people from having diseases or even before they engage themselves in risky status.”

“With our specialist in AI and machine learning, we aim at developing and applying algorithms to tackle high-impact real-world problems in healthcare. We believe that our team can make the best use of the enormous amount of data from the hospital,” says Assoc. Prof. Dr. Siridech Boonsang, Dean of the Faculty of Information Technology, KMITL. “Currently, many people care about their health and are interested in monitoring it. Thanks to smart wearable technology and advances in sensors, we can collect a large amount of data that enable us to create predictive models,” says Assoc. Prof. Dr. Kitsuchart Pasupa, Vice Dean for Research and Innovation of the faculty.

Together with BDMS’s medical expertise and rich data, KMITL’s machine learning research team, the hypotheses generated by our AI platform will be scrutinized and translated into actionable insights — into health recommendations that benefit the people and society,” said Dr Boontawee Suntisrivaraporn, AI Impact Manager of SparkBeyond.

“The opportunity to join forces with Thailand’s largest hospital to create a positive impact on the health and well being of people is in line with our mission, to use AI to do well while doing good,” said Arun Poojari, General Manager Asia Pacific of SparkBeyond. “SparkBeyond’s advanced problem-solving systems have led the way in transforming many industries, and we look forward to this exciting collaboration.”

No domain better demonstrates the potential for AI analytics to improve the world than healthcare. While medical advancements in the last century have led to dramatic increases in life expectancy, data science applications are being applied to help clinicians and researchers combat some of the most pressing medical and logistical issues facing the healthcare industry.

While the healthcare industry faces unique regulatory and scientific challenges, just like in other industries good communication and collaboration are critical towards the success and operationalization of analytics advancements. Reach out to our Impact team to learn how SparkBeyond can benefit your business and community with AI analytics.