Ateneo Profeesional Schools
Makati City
July 30, 2016
Today marks the 2nd batch of entrepreneurs presentation by Groups which is 25 points of the grade of the group. Todays guests were Dr Eloy Marcelo, classmate of Dr. June2 Serrano at UP PGH a surgeon and father of telehealth in the Philippines and Dr. Rommel Bautista, an ophthalmologist and owner of Fino fine leathergoods.
Dr. Eloy Marcelo Father of Telehealth in the Philippines
His real passion was to be in computer. But his parent who are both doctors wanted him to be a doctor. So he passed the Med School and wanted to be in a different specialist until he met someone who told him it is best to be surgeon. So he trained for surgery at PGH. While he was there he noticed that only the Surgery Dept had computers and decided to use this for data base encoding of the surgical cases for census and stats.
He was able to convince their department when he learned that there is such a training for medical informatics. He trained for 2 years in US and was thereafter a telemedicine man.
His mission is how to integrate the very dis aggregated health care services. It is a fee based each dr to his own paper based patient records; the pharmacy, the hospital each with its own set of records, even with the use of comptuers
1. Definition of terms:
1. e health - umbrella of health information; telehealth
2. telemedicine - delivery of health services over a distance
Both has its own set of problems. E health has privacy issues and competition issues
Telemedicine is low yield transaction and even exposes the inquirer to being branded as incompetent for not knowing how do a procedure better, it is anonymous, makes one like a call center agent.
Dr. Marcelo found it the hard way. He was able to get a funding for P40 million, spent half of it to get only 8 referrals because of the above concerns.
The only thing that is workable for telemedicine would be a ecosystem where there would be no diseases, a preventive health care; a self directed health system where you can order laboratory, medicine, nursing health (not telemedicine as we would like to understand it)
2. E health would work only to overcome the competition issues, if this would be tied up to Philhealth, ie the e claims system. Only those who would have connected to t he PHIE, or would be using the eleectronic format for claims would get reimbursed:
It would be fast: the membership can be verified online and the payee can track their claims. The eclaim system was authored by the good doctor while he was SVP of Philhealth under Dr. Banzon (Politics?)
