New artificial intelligence platform introduced to boost Thai healthcare sector

Soma Somasundaram, chief technology officer for Infor, said at the recent Inforum 2019 summit that the healthcare sector, for example, will benefit from the AI platform in terms of better productivity, more patient satisfaction and enhanced security.
With this AI platform as a service, there is going to be a single-user experience as well as single sign-on for greater productivity and security.
The near real-time analytics also allows linkages with ride-hailing platforms such as Uber to partner with healthcare providers to facilitate patient follow-up appointments with doctors using data on the ride-hailing platform, Somasundaram said.
Helen Masters, senior vice president of Infor for Asia Pacific, said Thailand’s healthcare, food and beverage, fashion retail and logistic sectors figure prominently in Infor’s efforts to accelerate the digital transformation journey.
Over the past six months, Infor has launched a wide range of new solutions for hospital workforce measurements, doctor and nurse appointments, patient schedule processing for healthcare providers in Australia, New Zealand and Asean markets such as Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Philippines using the AI/cloud platform.
For public and private hospitals, they can benefit from better and faster processing of hundreds of thousands of patient, doctor and nurse schedules on daily, weekly and monthly basis as well as inventory and supply chain management for drugs, medical supplies and other resources.
Citing Queensland Health in Australia as an example, she said, productivity has been rising as a result of better people and process management using robotic and automation systems as well as housekeeping and other apps on hand-held devices.
Healthcare providers in the US such as Northern Light Health, which has about 900 doctors, also uses Infor’s cloud-based solutions for its supply chain and financial management, while Palos Health reports a 10 per cent reduction in drug stock using a more intelligent inventory system.
In addition, doctors and nurses can spend more time with patients due to a better scheduling system.
In Thailand, the healthcare sector is a major focus for Infor due to the good quality of Thailand’s healthcare system, which has been ranked as the world’s sixth best by US magazine CEOWorld whose 2019 index has Taiwan, South Korea and Japan in the top three slots followed by Denmark (5th), Spain (7th), France (8th) Belgium (9th) and Australia (10th).
In addition, Thailand also has a significant medical tourism sector with millions of foreign patients visiting the country annually for healthcare services.
Kevin Samuelson, CEO of Infor, said the firm aims to deliver better business value to customers with a new generation of predictive analytics, machine-learning software with new algorithms and new data-lake strategy for finance, human resources and asset management.
Better harnessing of datasets leads to better insights, contents and business outcomes.
Infor’s Somasundaram said better datasets as a single source of truth create better AI and machine-learning platforms for customers, while Infor and partners provide computing power, data training at scale, and model updates to deliver better results.
For example, Infor’s Coleman AI platform for embedded machine-learning models provides the speed, repeatability and personalisation needed for businesses and industries to use AI as an effective tool.
This has tackled the weaknesses resulting from developer-centric tools, which were designed previously for experimental projects, making it difficult to implement complete commercial projects with good quality and speed.
As a result, the practical use of AI and machine learning in the enterprise has been minimal, prompting Infor to launch the new AI platform as a service with industry-specific templates designed for use by “citizen developers”, so they don’t need extensive data modelling and other expertise.