Abstract
In 2022, Thai government added Newborn hearing screening to the national healthcare
benefit package for early detection and rehabilitation in child with congenital hearing
problems. Hearing loss has a great impact on a child's and parent’s quality of life if it’s not
been detected and rehabilitated since the early years. Currently, the main challenges are the
insufficiency of equipment and human resources in every public hospital. The newborns in
some hospitals needed to be transferred for hearing screening at the node hospital in the
same health district and if the tests were referred then they will be appointed for hearing
diagnostic tests in the center hospitals. Missing patients occur along the process due to the
variety of the appointment systems for each hospital and the unlink of data between
hospitals. Therefore, the efficiency of newborn hearing screening program in Thailand is
difficult to evaluate.
The UNHS system that has been developed in this project was designed to be the
universal platform for hospitals to share the same data set and appointment function made
to be the connector between hospitals. The system also can show the status of patients for
healthcare providers and users to track the individual’s hearing test process.
There are 22,692 newborns registered in this system with the average age for hearing
diagnosis at 4.71 months old. There are 9 cases of bilateral sensorineural hearing loss and 2
of them received hearing aids for aural rehabilitation and 2 of them are on process for disabled
person ID card registration and the rest are on process for hearing aid fitting.
With the proper and user-friendly registration system, the universal newborn hearing
screening in Thailand could be more effective and practical especially with the use of online
forms, data should be more complete and up to date in the universal system for all hospitals.
