By Tony Low · AI in Action · October 16, 2026

In Phuket, a patient walks into a provincial hospital for a routine diabetes check-up, sits in front of a camera for a few seconds, and leaves with an eye screening result that, a decade ago, would have required a referral to a specialist ophthalmologist and a wait of weeks or months. That shift is the quiet payoff of a Taiwan-Thailand telemedicine partnership now rolling out across five hospitals in Thailand’s southern province, built around an AI system that can read a single retinal photograph for three separate diseases at once.

The technology comes from Acer Medical, the healthcare subsidiary of Taiwan’s Acer Inc, working with Thai ophthalmic equipment specialist New Eye Inc and Taiwan-based Upsynergy. Under a government-led telemedicine project, Phuket Provincial Hospital and four other facilities in the province have adopted Acer Medical’s ARC-1000 non-mydriatic fundus camera paired with its VeriSee DR software, an AI diagnostic tool that screens for diabetic retinopathy without requiring the pupil-dilating eye drops that make traditional exams slow and uncomfortable. Both the hardware and software have cleared approval from Thailand’s Food and Drug Administration.

The problem the project is aimed at is a real bottleneck in healthcare systems across the region, not just Thailand: diabetic retinopathy is one of the leading causes of preventable blindness worldwide, but catching it early requires a retinal exam read by a trained eye specialist, and specialists are concentrated in big cities. A nurse or general practitioner in a provincial hospital can operate the fundus camera; the AI model does the first read, flags images with likely signs of disease, and routes only those cases to an ophthalmologist for confirmation. For patients, that turns a multi-step referral process into a same-visit check. For hospitals with thin specialist rosters, it multiplies how many patients they can realistically screen.

Acer Medical’s broader platform, VeriSee, extends the same single retinal image to screen for age-related macular degeneration and glaucoma alongside diabetic retinopathy — three of the most common causes of vision loss in older adults, read from one quick, non-invasive scan. The company has also built an osteoporosis-screening tool, VeriOsteo OP, that repurposes chest X-rays taken for unrelated reasons to flag low bone density, part of a broader strategy of pulling extra diagnostic value out of imaging hospitals are already capturing.

Thailand is not a one-off market for this approach. In an October interview with the Taipei Times, Acer Medical chairman and CEO Allen Lien said the company’s screening and patient-management software is now used by roughly 600 to 700 healthcare institutions in Taiwan and in more than 20 countries and territories abroad, with Malaysia and Thailand the two largest markets for the company in Southeast Asia. Lien said hospital attitudes toward AI diagnostics have shifted over the past two years, from questioning whether the technology works to asking how quickly they can deploy it to keep pace with peer institutions — a sentiment that tracks with what’s showing up in Phuket’s hospital network. He added that the company is in discussions on more than 20 new hospital and medical-center projects, with several expected to be announced before the end of the year, and that it is developing further retinal-imaging applications with partners in the Middle East, North America and Southeast Asia.

The financial numbers behind the expansion are modest in absolute terms but trending the right way: Acer Medical’s revenue for the first eight months of this year rose 50.1% year on year to NT$51.39 million (about US$1.62 million), and the company expects full-year revenue to top last year’s total, citing government healthcare programs and growing partnerships at home and abroad as the drivers.

For a region where diabetes prevalence is climbing and specialist capacity isn’t growing nearly as fast, this is a useful template: pair a cheap, fast imaging device with an AI model trained to do the first-pass read, put it in the hands of general clinical staff rather than specialists, and let the technology do the triage. It’s a far less flashy story than a national AI strategy or a billion-dollar data-centre announcement, but it’s the kind of deployment that actually touches patients — in this case, giving provincial hospitals in Phuket diagnostic reach that used to belong only to major urban eye centres.

Source: PR Newswire, 7 May 2026; Taipei Times, 7 October 2026.

Tony Low covers how AI is built, deployed, and used across the region for AIAPAC.ai Insights.