Kespechara said Hospital OS had helped many healthcare organisations to improve their processes and management over nearly a decade. Data mining technology can now be used to improve the overall clinical care given by healthcare organizations, as well as helping to control their spiraling costs.

"We have applied several exploratory data-analysis techniques and generalised linear models to extract data from the hospital-information systems, and this suggests that the reuse of stored data can become a powerful tool to support long-term hospital management," Kongkiat said.

Hospital OS software - bearing the same name as its developer - is a hospital-information system developed locally using open-source technology. It offers modules to support different hospital services, such as the outpatient and inpatient departments.

Currently, the software has been implemented in 95 hospitals, 180 primary-care units, 154 clinics and 68 health centres throughout the country.

Kongkiat said a new version, Hospital OS 4.0, will integrate clinical-practice guidelines to give alerts for immediate action, rather than simply monitoring. It will also track patient locations to combat the spread of disease.

It aims to help hospitals to manage epidemics faster through easy visualising, testing and mapping. It will use all health information to assist in community planning, and will use an epidemic alarm system to track disease outbreaks to their source. It will also allow real-time consultations with distant medical specialists.

 Sixty-eight per cent of healthcare organisations in Thailand are primary-care units. Clinics make up 23 per cent; hospitals, 7 per cent; and health units, 2 per cent.

 Next year, the primary-care units that make up the majority of Thailand's healthcare organisations will change status, and become subdistrict health-promotion hospitals. For Hospital OS, this means that the number of hospitals with potential to use its software will leap by about 75 per cent.

 Kongkiat said a key factor driving the adoption of Hospital OS software by many hospitals and healthcare units was its open-source technology and the fact it was designed and developed to allow users the freedom to run and improve the software to suit their needs as well as to copy and share the software with neighbouring hospitals.

 "We offer four main services: IT system consulting, software implementation, system customisation and user training," Kongkiat said. "With fewer than 20 staff, we have supported more than 450 health units around Thailand. We trained hospital volunteers who had no IT knowledge to be Linux and system administrators."

 Hospital OS has gained many IT awards in recent years. It won the Foundation for Research in Information Technology's IT Princess 2007 Award for the Best Thai Software Development of the Year. In 2008 Software Park (Thailand) gave it a Software for Society award and placed the company in its Hall of Fame. The firm also won a Thailand ICT Excellence Award in 2008 and this year won a Thailand ICT award as well as being an E-health nominee in the Asia Oceania ICT Awards.  

The company has used the Bt1-million prize from its IT Princess 2007 Award to organise its own competition, called the Hospital OS Awards. It aims to encourage small hospitals in rural areas to develop and apply their own IT systems using Hospital OS software, and to improve their community-healthcare services.

 This year's Hospital OS Award winners were selected last week. The winner is Phakdeechumpol Hospital.

The first runner-up is Thaphae Hospital and the second runner-up, Lomsak Hospital.