THKD taps SAP and Azure to improve patient experience

Malaysia’s Thomson Hospital Kota Damansara (THKD) is deploying new SAP systems and tapping Microsoft Azure’s cloud infrastructure to improve patient experience while driving operational efficiency.

The healthcare group has started the first phase of its deployment plan in November 2020, which includes implementing SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and healthcare offerings such as SAP Patient Management and SAP Cerner i.s.h.med. The project is expected to be completed in 2023.

THKD has engaged T-Systems Singapore on the software migration and deployment, which will provide staff with a real-time dashboard that they can use to remotely access medical records, manage patient experience, order supplies and expedite billing processes.

“Once the migration is completed, patients can receive their hospital bills within minutes instead of hours, which is a huge bonus to enhancing patient experience with THKD,” said Andy David, healthcare director at T-Systems. “Moreover, hospital staff can easily manage schedules, hospital equipment needs and supplies without consulting multiple sources, which results in bolstering the quality-of-care THKD can deliver for patients.”

Nadiah Wan, executive director and group CEO of TMC Life Sciences, the parent company of THKD, said the software deployment comes at a time when the hospital group is expanding its physical capacity.

It currently features 200 beds and over 100 trained medical and surgical consultants. Once the expansion is completed, the new facility will have a combined capacity of 600 beds, 12 operating theatres, 154 outpatient specialist clinics and an integrated cancer and nuclear medicine centre, among other key tertiary healthcare services. 

“When we embarked on this expansion programme to add 400 beds, we decided to future-proof our offerings and embark on a digital transformation that would support our vision to provide patient centred services and integrated, value-based healthcare,” said Wan.

Wan said THKD partnered with T-Systems because the IT service provider has a “proven track record” of implementing SAP for Healthcare solutions in Southeast Asia that improve operational efficiency in the finance, procurement, revenue cycle management and electronic medical records functions.

“It is also a fully integrated system from front to back with best practices in place, allowing us to make a large leap in transforming and improving ourselves, rather than an incremental step-wise change,” she added.

Arkadiusz Czopor, managing director at T-Systems Asia South, said the new systems will not only provide THKD with real-time visibility of what is happening throughout the hospital, but also the scalability it needs to expand its footprint in future.

In 2019, SAP teamed up with Microsoft as part of Project Embrace to help customers move on-premise SAP ERP and SAP S/4 Hana systems to Azure and other public clouds.

The cloud partnerships would enable SAP and hyperscale cloud providers, along with their networks of system integrators, to provide enterprises with reference architectures and road maps for cloud migrations.

Earlier this year, SAP sharpened its industry focus with the Industry Cloud, an open business process and technology platform with an application programming interface framework that provides access to capabilities in SAP’s core business applications.

SAP partners will also be able to design, build, test and validate their Industry Cloud offerings via a common data model, as well as a business domain model that lays out relationships between entities, such as between customers and invoices.