The modules include workflow management, registration, screening, diagnosis, ordering, appointment, service history and order history, pharmacy, billing, lab and X-ray reports, helping put all these medical services onto the electronic database.

From the registration process to a patient's ID or hospital number, hospital staff can access the records quickly through the system and send patients to the concerned doctor immediately.

Doctors can also feed new medical information about a patient into the system. They can also send out prescriptions electronically to pharmacists through the system.

"Instead of reading a doctor's handwriting, the pharmacists can read the prescription directly from the computer and this helps reduce errors," Kongkiat said.

Moreover, once a bigger number of government hospitals and clinics go in for Hospital OS, their systems can be linked.

The Provincial Public Health Office can then use the health-related information for healthcare planning. The Hospital OS can also be linked to Google Maps and keep Provincial Public Health officials abreast of the overall healthcare status and manage epidemics faster. The healthcare information is available in the form of visuals, text and maps.

When the hospitals are linked, officials can check the healthcare status of each area and track people infected with a disease and zero in on the area that seems to have an outbreak.

This can help at the time of formulating national policies, too.  

Because the system is licence free, the team expects to expand its use to cover at least 100 hospitals by the end of this year.

There are about 700 small hospitals with 100 beds or less nationwide. This means Kongkiat's work will not be over anytime soon.