Thailand is in the process of adopting technologies appropriate for its context to provide telemedicine on a national scale. However, there are some gaps that make achieving universal telemedicine in Thailand challenging on certain areas. Technological factors and the lack of a uniform information system is a problem, e.g., administrators select their own information systems which are incompatible with regards to future use, data items, and versions. Additionally, the poor performance of internet connection made patient identification, automatic data recording, and record pulling processes sometimes quite slow.

To ensure successful implementation, it is imperative to strategically plan the next steps. Drawing insights from practical telemedicine experiences from other settings can be pivotal to avoiding repeating past errors. Therefore, a study visit to a country line Singapore, which has made strides in implementing telemedicine, was deemed essential to grasp their digital health service provisions and foster dialogue between Thai and Singaporean stakeholders.

This study visit is supported by the Health Systems Research Institute (HSRI) which supports a study titled “Recommendations to support the development of operation and M&E process for telemedicine programme based on lessons learned from Thailand and the world”. This study is part of the World Health Organization’s Country Cooperation Strategy (WHO-CCS) on digital health, which is supported by WHO, the Thai Health Promotion Foundation (ThaiHealth), with the Strategy and Planning Division (SPD) of the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) and the Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program (HITAP) serving as the Secretariat.