Fast Company has an interesting profile of Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand. Bumrungrad is one of the top hospitals in the world catering to medical tourists. In 2006 Bumrungrad Hospital provided medical care for 430,000 international patients (Fast Company Article). The hospital is state-of-the-art:
A journey to Bumrungrad is hardly a descent into some third-world medical hell…Administrators have spent the past 15 years acquiring state-of-the-art technology, adding beds, and wooing Thai doctors abroad to come home. Bumrungrad replaced its paper records seven years ago with a homegrown, all-digital system, an upgrade U.S. hospitals have struggled with for years, despite the assistance of giants like Cerner, Siemens, and General Electric. (Replacing prescription pads with tablet PCs is harder than you'd think, which might explain why last year Microsoft bought the company that designed Bumrungrad's software…
The hospital's outpatient clinic is more stylish than the bar at my five-star hotel. Instead of waitresses, some two dozen nurses tend to a polyglot mix of patients. Arrivals from Asia or the Middle East have separate floors to make them feel at home. There's an in-house travel agency offering visa extensions in case they suddenly need to stay. Modernizing late offered Bumrungrad a chance to leapfrog the competition and build the world's first truly global hospital.
