03-Sep-14 Hot on the tail of Alibaba's Taobao being accepted for payment in some hospitals in China, Tencent has addressed a major barrier to adoption by allowing patients to pay for hospital services in Guangdong with its WeChat system, and crucially, integrating with the government health insurance system which automatically picks up the eligible portion of the bill. [image: SCMP]

30-Sep-14 As more people gain access to connected devices, entrepreneurs and organisations across Southeast Asia see potential to speed improvements in healthcare with new web and mobile applications such as Ring.MD in Singapore, Dokita in Indonesia and mClinica in the Philippines. [image: Techonomy]

28-Sep-14 Unlike in some countries where hospitals are encouraged to adopt electronic medical record (EMR) systems by the government, hospitals in Korea are not required to go digital, but the number of facilities with EMR has still increased dramatically over the past decade. [image: Seoul National University Bundang Hospital]

23-Sep-14 Vietnam has made progress towards universal social health insurance, currently providing coverage to more than half and heading towards 75% by 2015 and 80% by 2020. The country is also funding healthcare system investment and installing the latest technologies and state-of-the-art infrastructure.

23-Sep-14 Public health targets in Thailand are being lowered and hospital subsidies frozen for the next fiscal year following a cut in the government healthcare budget. Officials said the funding gap would put a crunch on state-owned hospitals, but insisted patients would not be affected.