The cabinet has approved a budget worth 1.5 billion baht to develop a cloud service for the public health database which would be universally accessible by hospitals nationwide, says deputy government spokeswoman Tipanan Sirichana.
The decision assigns the Office of the National Digital Economy and Society Commission -- under the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society (DES) -- the task of developing the cloud database.
Earlier in June, 2022, the DES and the Ministry of Public Health signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to cooperate on the database to digitally connect the healthcare system of the future.
Medical data stored on the cloud service will be protected by the Personal Data Protection Act. The cloud service would be accessible by the public and hospitals to manage patients' personal medical data effectively, said Ms Tipanan.
The project is a part of a larger policy to create a national health information platform. The cloud service will be managed by the government and used for medical purposes.
Ms Tipanan said the national health information platform would be subsidised by a 1.5-billion-baht-budget during 2023-2025.
Some 553 million baht comes from the 2023 fiscal year budget and another 960 million baht from the cross-fiscal-year budget during 2024-2025, she said.
Of the budget amount, 1.1 billion baht would be spent on the cloud service's application software and personnel training.
Another 385 million baht would be used for cloud server management, cloud virtual machines subscription, storage, and security services, she added.
Ms Tipanan said the national health information platform aims to implement data exchange for hospitals registered under the Public Health Ministry and medical centres. Moreover, the data will be stored for further research and development.
The platform will also work as a central data exchange service among public and private sectors.
Lastly, she added the platform would enable outpatients to transfer to other hospitals seamlessly. The data on the platform can be accessed from all levels.
She added that, with the cloud service, more than 9,000 hospitals registered under the ministry and sub-district health promotion hospitals could gain access to medical data for outpatients.
"In case of emergency, hospitals can access patients' medical history quickly via the platform and they can use the data for telemedicine," Ms Tipanan said.