At the CyberPress Forum held recently at the iAcademy auditorium in Makati City, experts from the industry said ICT is transforming the way health care is provided in the country for both the under-funded public health facilities and state-of-the-art private medical centers and hospitals.
Dr. Alvin Marcelo, director of the National Telehealth Center in UP Manila, said "telemedicine" modalities such as short messaging system (SMS), multimedia messaging system (MMS), and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) can help serve far-flung areas where the availability of doctors and health professionals is scarce.
Marcelo said 50% of Filipinos die without ever seeing a doctor in their lifetime and ICT could partly solve the problem.
Established by the University of the Philippines' Board of Regents in 1998 as an attached agency of the National Institute of Health (NIH), the National Telehealth Center is based at the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) and is mandated to "design and develop IT-based solutions that will provide primary health care to local communities served."
In 2005, the Commission on ICT (CICT), through the E-Government fund, awarded a grant to the National TeleHealth Center so it could "design and develop ten telehealth and telementoring systems" in the provinces of Cagayan Valley, Capiz Province, Leyte and Iligan, where the UP Manila medical school has satellite facilities.
However, Marcelo admitted that the set-up initially failed to reach its goals of providing remote telemedicine to the selected areas. The system took off only after barrio doctors "shifted to SMS teleferrals" that make use of "simpler technology and have less need for tech support."
At the Telehealth Center, patient records are compiled and kept using open-source software, which, according to Marcelo, is easy-to-use, customizable, and capable of generating standard reports for local, provincial and regional patients, including components necessary for PhilHealth.
The center also offers e-learning in the form of a collection of formal and non-formal courses such as Masters of Science in health informatics; geographic information systems for health leaders; e-health project management and; e-learning for community health. The modules are taught by distance learning using VoIP, cellular phone, radio, or whatever means is available.
For the part of the private sector, De Los Santos-STI MegaClinic administrative director Jose Ronaldo De Los Santos said that, unlike government-run institutions, local private medical hospitals are globally competitive in terms of modern equipment.
He said this is what is needed to stay in the business since IT has now become "as important as medical expertise and specialized medical equipment."
"We are now digitizing about 20 years' worth of medical records to the patients' financial records. We are going into a paperless setup where the patient is registered digitally in an (offsite) database," De Los Santos said.
Doctors see patients at their clinic based on a "digital queuing system," which is linked to a computer network that allows a doctor to simply type his prescriptions into the computer and click on the tests he is prescribing for the patient, as well as (encode) the diagnosis. "Our patients also get their lab results sooner, over the Internet, by email, making diagnosis quicker and more efficient--in many cases detecting diseases earlier so patients can seek less expensive and timelier treatment," he explained.
De Los Santos said the Megaclinic is also working toward obtaining optical character recognition technology to make every word (in a patient's medical records) a searchable record. He explained that each word in the document will act like a hyperlink that automatically allows access to other cross-referenced data within the same set of records. "However, the constraint is cost; though there is a need for such data mining capability so doctors will have better and quicker access to their patient records."
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Quelle/Source: Computerworld Singapore, 06.05.2008
