Operating in Thailand’s highly competitive health care market and facing the added challenge of the pandemic, Sikarin Hospital embarked on a digital transformation. The goal: to better understand patient needs, deliver more personalised health care and maximise efficiency.

A listed company in Thailand, Sikarin Public Company Limited provides a wide range of medical and health care services through three Sikarin Hospitals operating in Bangkok, Samut Prakan and Hat Yai.

As a mid-tier general hospital, Sikarin Hospital faces competition from larger hospital chains offering end-to-end services, as well as from smaller niche hospitals specialising in specific treatments. On top of that, the COVID-19 outbreak left many parts of Thailand’s economy and business landscape fragile and vulnerable, impacting all consumers.

To overcome these challenges and set themselves up for sustainable and profitable growth through the pandemic and beyond, the leadership team of Sikarin Hospital knew that intelligent technology could make a big difference.

A focus on understanding patients and quality care

The business goal of the project was to use digital tools to grow revenue by improving patient experience while rationalising costs to ultimately boost profits.

On the revenue side, the team needed systems to improve service levels, staff collaboration and patient communications – pre and post care – to attract new patients and maintain the satisfaction and loyalty of existing patients.

To reduce costs, they planned to digitalise processes to centralise and automate operations to reduce manual tasks and duplication across the three hospitals.

Having assessed their options, Sikarin Hospital engaged iiG to partner with them on the design and implementation of an end-to-end customer relationship management (CRM) platform running on Salesforce.

3 hospitals, 450 beds, 700 outpatients per day... one CRM

As proven Salesforce Partners – and previous APAC Partner of the Year award winners – iiG embraced the challenge to design an innovative platform to help the hospital thrive.

With three hospital locations with over 450 beds and multiple clinics treating 700+ outpatients per day, a core requirement was to have one system running consistently across the organisation.

To design the solution, iiG used their proprietary Data-Driven CRM Framework to map the entire customer journey from admission to follow-up care and define how each small piece fitted together. With a focus on customer needs and expectations, this process led to a clear digital transformation journey, business value assessment and technology architecture. iiG proposed a solution that used Salesforce Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud to deliver the core business functionality, with additional integration provided by MuleSoft, the world’s leading integration platform.

Design Thinking enhances patient experience

Far beyond simply digitising existing processes, iiG ran a series of Design Thinking workshops with specific functional areas – including the Care Center, Check-up Clinic, Dental Clinic and Pediatric Clinic – to brainstorm new ways to improve customer experience.

For example, one of the major outcomes of this process was to design the Salesforce Customer 360 solution so that related clinics could access the same core set of patient data records. Having a single view of patients enabled a consistent and personalised care experience.

Rapidly designed and implemented in the early days of COVID-19, the solution went live while the pandemic was still impacting Thailand more broadly and delivered benefits from day one.

Increased efficiency, unlocked insights

The most immediate benefit of the integrated Salesforce solution was a fundamental improvement to core operations. This included faster patient response times, unified patient data records, accurate master data and an up-todate digital knowledge management system that was accessible on any device. These improvements meant less errors and faster customer response time.

The Project Manager on the Salesforce implementation at Sikarin Hospital expands on the benefits:

“Another major benefit that we never had before Salesforce was access to customer insights, analysis and reporting. Both for healthcare treatments and for follow up care, we can see precisely what the customer needs and easily collaborate between departments with real-time data. iiG helped us design and deploy an innovative CRM system that means our different business units can collaborate to offer a greater experience for our customers and generate better returns for the hospital at the same time.”

Record profits with more to come While multiple factors played a role in the success of the business, Sikarin Hospital’s financial performance in the year following the implementation showed a net profit of increase of 44% from the previous year, which is the highest increase in the past 10 years.