Siriraj Hospital

Siriraj Hospital

Siriraj has been investing in transforming themselves into a smart hospital. This project is regarded as one of their key innovation projects. It integrates tech advances like cloud, 5G, AI, IoT, and big data to take healthcare services to the next level. It also promotes innovation for intelligent protection from COVID-19 and provides robust IT support for diagnosis and treatment of other diseases after COVID-19 ends.

Siriraj has been investing in transforming themselves into a smart hospital. This project is regarded as one of their key innovation projects. It integrates tech advances like cloud, 5G, AI, IoT, and big data to take healthcare services to the next level. It also promotes innovation for intelligent protection from COVID-19 and provides robust IT support for diagnosis and treatment of other diseases after COVID-19 ends.

Why Huawei Cloud?

Huawei Cloud's hybrid cloud solution, Huawei Cloud Stack, provides cloud computing, big data, AI, and other tech advances plus an architecture enabling seamless collaboration between private and public clouds. It helped Siriraj Hospital establish an efficient, open, secure, and reliable hybrid cloud platform where services can be created on demand.

The cloud platform acts as a control center for running compute, storage, big data, and AI services. Siriraj Hospital also harnessed 5G, F5G, and Wi-Fi 6 solutions to establish a network connecting almost every corner of the hospital.

Backed by the cloud platform and various networking solutions, eight innovative applications delivering one-stop medical services have been launched to mitigate the COVID-19 surge, relieve patient congestion, and improve remote treatment for patients staying at home during the pandemic. These applications can also be repurposed for efficient treatment of patients with other diseases after COVID-19 ends.
Challenges

In early 2021, Thailand reported a surge in serious COVID-19 infections. Almost all hospital beds were quickly occupied. There were not enough beds available to handle the surge of incoming patients. Siriraj Hospital was soon assigned a leading role to treat COVID-19-infected patients while also providing conventional medical services for other patients. They were also tasked with offering remote diagnosis and treatment services for infected people staying at home. There were many challenges for Siriraj Hospital to overcome. For example, they needed cutting-edge technologies to help minimize infection risks with limited medical staff and resources. They needed to speed up drug delivery to patients and to promote remote diagnosis and treatment. They also looked to process sensitive data related to patient privacy separately from less sensitive data, like the data generated during hospital operations, procurement, vehicle management, and shift scheduling.

Solutions

Huawei Cloud and Siriraj Hospital worked in tandem to launch Huawei Cloud Stack (another hybrid cloud solution) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) to enhance the hospital's IT infrastructure, improve existing hospital services, and develop more state-of-the-art services during the COVID-19 pandemic. These services are underpinned by Huawei Cloud's cutting-edge technologies:
  • Diving into Cloud

  • Moving applications to cloud: A cloud transformation solution is designed to transform a traditional IT architecture into a cloud-based architecture and adapt to specifications of each application. It helps establish an ultra-large-scale foundation that delivers high availability (HA) and can accommodate traffic spikes when there are massive volumes of concurrent application requests.

  • Cloud- and 5G-powered Intelligent Emergency System

  • Intelligent triage: Cloud computing and AI are used to help medical personnel in the emergency department make faster and more accurate decisions about what care patients need next.

    Virtual consultation: 5G-based AR glasses allow emergency doctors and experts to acquire real patient views and accurate patient information.

    IoT services: 5G connects a large number of IoT devices to patient data to comprehensively monitor patient symptoms in emergency rooms and provide patients with real-time care.

  • Cloud- and F5G-powered Intelligent Pathological Diagnosis

  • F5G connects optical fibers to CT rooms and clinics. With high bandwidth, high reliability, and a simplified architecture, the OptiX network can quickly migrate 1,000 CT images to the cloud in seconds. In addition, AI-based diagnosis results can be quickly sent to clinics. The diagnosis efficiency is improved by 85%.

  • Blockchain for Access Control Over Electronic Health Records

  • Blockchain technologies are used to centrally manage electronic health records and guarantee the security of sensitive data related to patient privacy on the hybrid cloud.

  • Cloud- and 5G-based Smart Unmanned Logistics

  • Six 5G-driven unmanned vehicles were deployed to transport and allocate medical resources from hospital pharmacies to different hospital departments. A remote control center was deployed on the cloud for online management and remote control over vehicles.

Customer Benefits

Benefits

Faster, more accurate diagnosis

The AI-assisted COVID-19 diagnosis service provided by Huawei Cloud, AI-aided image recognition helps doctors catch 80% of the COVID-19 cases they encounter, and it returns results within 25 seconds, with diagnosis accuracy reaching 97%. It can also be used for treatment of other diseases such as pulmonary nodules, tuberculosis, spinal fractures, and strokes.

AI-powered scheduling for nurses in emergency rooms

The time required for nurse scheduling has been dramatically shortened from 5 days to 5 minutes. The request acceptance rate has been increased to 80%. Staffing has been optimized for smoother shifts.

Contactless drug logistics and delivery

Cloud- and 5G-powered unmanned vehicles can be used to directly deliver medicines to patients and transport COVID-19-infected patients, helping reduce risks of drug contamination and cross infection. Service records of these vehicles are reported, indicating what tasks they were used to finish. The records provide a basis for audit and process improvement.

More efficient treatment analysis

AI, cloud, and 5G help automatically centralize data and distribute data analysis tasks to pathologists, so they can work more efficiently.

Faster information collection

Doctors can quickly acquire accurate information like patient symptoms, so they can prepare treatment solutions ahead of schedule.

Secure and trusted data

Thanks to the architecture enabling collaboration between public and hybrid clouds, precise and secure data is provided to improve both diagnosis accuracy and efficiency. More importantly, patient privacy is strictly protected.