Diabetes has been a public health challenge in Thailand. According to International Diabetes Federations , Thailand is one of the 22 countries and territories of the IDF WP region. Benefited from the universal health coverage in 2002, most of Thais have diabetes were funded primarily by out-of-pocket payments, enabling 10% of adults in the country’s 68 million residents – to access to the necessary medicines. Dr. Kongkiat Ketpechara, who transformed his role from medical practitioner to a software entrepreneur and even a nutritionist and an agriculturist over a decade, has been playing an influential role in medical & health development of Thailand.
Dr. Kongkiat Ketpechara – Pushing eHealth Forward in Thailand
Back in 2000s, in face of the rising population and lack of health consciousness in Thailand, as a practicing MD in Phuket Hospital , Dr. Kongkiat Ketpechara addressed the growing medical problems in community and was eager to solve the problems in a practical way. Therefore, he founded Hospital OS, a software company to develop an open source program aimed to provide efficient medical service and hospital management with support from Thailand Research Fund in 2000s.
Dr. Kongkiat’s innovative thinking drove him to step forward and further improve the health condition of Thai in different ways. Since then, he has been playing a dual roles across a medical doctor, a software developer and healthcare IT visionary. He promoted the ‘open source’ Hospital OS software platform to enable small, rural hospitals not even in 95 hospitals and 400 health centres in Thailand, but also India and Africa to provide improved health care services, serving millions patients in as a whole. There have been requests from more than 40 countries around the world such as India, U.S., Phillipines, Botswana, Brazil, Nigeria, and other countries interested in the potential benefits of using Hospital OS.
As a true healer imprinted with a DNA of social entrepreneur, Dr. Kongkiat went further into the food source of Thai people – RICE. He partnered with scientific labs and became an agricultural pioneer and launched Pensook Rice – an organic, whole grain, brown rice is an excellent source of vitamins B & E, manganese, phosphorus, iron, dietary fiber and essential fatty acids that help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease of Thai people. No wonder he has been named as one of the ten innovative and amazing under 40-year-olds primed to be ASEANs Next Generation Leaders (ANGeLs).
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Photo:Ipensook/ Aly’s blog
