SEA Health Tech Investment Insights

Regulatory landscape, including data privacy laws, is favorable for healthtech startups in Thailand Biotech and digitalization are primed to be the next big areas of development in Thailand Digitalization: Thailand's eHealth strategy largely aims to develop effective IT infrastructure for the country's public health systems, and are actively searching for and working with tech firms to implement these solutions (e.g. VMware partnered with MoPH for IT infrastructure, Block M.D. running test trials for an EHR on blockchain) Biotech: With its already large market position in APAC's medical devices sector, Thailand's incentives are set to attract foreign and domestic projects and investments in the biotech and medical devices sector. Thailand's newly introduced data privacy act, the PDPA, closely following EU's GDPR to protect consumer data privacy Personal Data Protection: The most important part of the PDPA is getting user consent for collecting, using, and sharing data. This law applies to any businesses that collect, process, and/or share personal data in Thailand from users all around the world. In addition, businesses must ensure physical and digital security measures to protect the customer data from unauthorized and malicious access. Impact on startups in healthtech: PDPA requires a little bit more protocol, documentation, and communication, but it does not affect businesses significantly, nor does it create any issues/barriers for new startups. However, if Thailand were to implement additional standards such as the HIPAA Compliance equivalent in Thailand, this may pose barriers and more hurdles for healthtech startups working with patient data. Sources: Thailand Board of Investments, Relentless Data Privacy, SecurePrivacy INSEAD 41

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