23-Oct-14 Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health is accelerating the development of traditional Thai medical services, and giving a major boost to the use of Thai herbal remedies combined with modern medicine, in an effort to reduce dependence on imported pharmaceuticals. [image: Orchid Travel]

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]

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.

20-Sep-14 The member nations of ASEAN have pledged to strengthen primary healthcare in order to achieve universal health coverage and increase access to primary care for their people, prevent and control non-communicable diseases and newly-emerging infectious diseases, and to set up a sustainable and effective health financing system. [image: Gunawan Kartapranata]