Business DNA: Patient Focus as a Growth Strategy
Dr. Andrew Stotz, CFA, sits down with Chane Laosonthorn, the Deputy CEO and CFO of Wattanapat Hospital Trang (WPH), a SET-listed hospital network featured in Uncovered Thai Stocks.
Welcome to Business DNA, a chance for us to delve into the essential make-up of business leaders and their organizations. Our focus is not on the short term but instead on understanding the driving forces behind business. Our guest today is Chane Laosonthorn, Deputy CEO and CFO of SET-listed Wattanapat Hospital Trang Public Company Limited.
This post is a summary; click below to download the full interview as a PDF.
Leader DNA: Chane Laosonthorn
Chane Laosonthorn was about to accept a promotion in Australia, where he’d built a career in finance and human resources, when his grandmother called about the family hospital in Trang. His grandfather, the hospital’s founder, had fallen ill, and the family was facing a decision: sell the hospital, run it, or diversify into something else. They chose to keep it running. They just needed someone to do it. Chane, who had no medical background and had never worked in a hospital, came back and took the job.
What he found was a business built almost entirely around one man’s instincts. Chane’s outsider status turned out to be useful: instead of treating the hospital as a medical institution he wasn’t qualified to touch, he treated it as a set of systems and people he could examine. He kept what made his grandfather’s care personal, while changing everything that depended on one man to run it.
What Chane Laosonthorn shared:
Founder values must be translated into systems – His grandfather’s attention to every patient had to become a measurable standard the rest of the hospital could follow.
What clinics can’t afford, Wattanapat built – Small clinics can’t afford the specialists or the equipment for serious cases. Wattanapat built that capability instead, adding specialists like neurosurgeons and cardiologists.
Local healthcare providers can be partners rather than competitors – Community clinics handle the basic cases and send Wattanapat the ones that need emergency, inpatient, or specialist care. It’s not competition; help flows both ways.
Growth requires selective investment – The hospital doesn’t try to offer every procedure; it invests where there’s real patient need and refers rare cases elsewhere. Even the offices are bare; every baht goes to equipment instead.
People are the real growth constraint – Keeping the right people is what limits growth. On Samui, specialists come from elsewhere and tend to leave. On the mainland, the problem is finding department heads who are managers, not just clinicians.
About Wattanapat Hospital Trang PCL (WPH)
Wattanapat Hospital Trang Public Company Limited (WPH) started as a two-room clinic in Trang, southern Thailand. It was opened by Dr. Vitaya Leelawat, a top student turned physician so trusted that a local intersection now carries his name. What started as one doctor seeing more patients than any single person could handle grew into a network of five hospitals spanning Thailand’s Andaman and Gulf coasts, including Trang, Krabi, Koh Samui, and Phuket. WPH was listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand in 2017.
Next week, we’ll share the full video interview.