Applying QR code and mobile application to improve service process in Thai hospital

Hospital overcrowding has been a problem in Thai public healthcare system. The main cause of this problem is the limited available resources, including a limited number of doctors, nurses, and limited capacity and availability of medical devices. There have been attempts to alleviate the problem through various strategies. In this paper, a low-cost system was developed and tested in a public hospital with limited budget. The system utilized QR code and smartphone application to capture as-is hospital processes and the time spent on individual activities. With the available activity data, two algorithms were developed to identify two quantities that are valuable to conduct process improvement: the most congested time and bottleneck activities. The system was implemented in a public hospital and results were presented.