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What is the key to administrating hospitals under BDMS?We won’t interrupt the culture or dominate the internal affairs of each hospital. To give you an example, there are four branches of Phyathai and another four of Paolo Memorial Hospital; we let all eight branches administrate themselves individually. What we’re concerned about is making sure that ultimately they follow our main policies. As they belong to the same company, we provide financial support as well as equipment and manpower to the hospitals. Hospitals in our group can be compared to houses in the same family. We are merging them into one community where they can share the common space. That’s how to get the most out of our medical equipment and human resources. In the past, each hospital invested in these resources separately and they could not maximize their use, resulting in profit loss. Medicalspecialists are also able to be translocated among hospitals in the group to ensure that effective treatments from experts apply to all patients. These factors have helped our health care business flourish.What is the fundamental policy of the hospitals in your group?The capability of a health care service is categorized by the complexity of medical treatment that a hospital can provide. The hospitals in our group are able to provide complete lines of service to cover patients residing around their location. Therefore, in terms of marketing, we do not compete with each other and let the hospitals target their own client base. We’ re also concerned with having an adequate number of proficient medical personnel in every hospital, since normally a patient will suffer from more than one disease and eachdisease is far more complicated than it was previously. Different types of illnesses need different experts and treatments.If you look back on Thailand 50 years ago, you won’t find any private hospitals. At that time, freshly graduated medics usually set up individual clinics. Those clinics, however, were not so successful because once patients required a specialist or any high-tech equipment they couldn’t be transferred to public hospitals, as the government services were limited to existing patients. Private hospitals, consequently, were established to fill this gap while the clinics gradually disappeared.The ASEAN Economic Commu- nity will start at the end of the year. How do you see Thailand’s role as an international medical hub?The ASEAN region is a market that BDMS is penetrating. Among the 108 Elite+