Smart develops e-healthcare
DR. MIMI Bondoc, municipal health officer of Zarraga, Iloilo, has worked in public health service for the past 26 years, and has witnessed how technology has helped in improving the delivery of healthcare to Filipinos, particularly those in underserved areas.
Technology, she says, helped address one of the biggest constraints of public healthcare facilities—lack of manpower.
She recalls how patients would line up for hours for a consult with a health worker. Many of them would go home displeased by the poor quality of public health services. Undermanned, she and her team need to work longer hours so all patients for the day are served.
Then in 2011, Smart Communications chose Zarraga as one of the pilot sites for its innovation Secured Health Innovation Network Exchange or SHINE, an electronic medical record (EMR) platform that digitizes patients’ records.
With this breakthrough, patients’ records are accessible unlike before when everything is done manually and the health center staff had to spend more time looking for the records of patients.
“We owe the improvement in the public health system to technology. The breakthrough in EMR made our workload lighter and helped address the lack in manpower. We’ve been using this Smart innovation for more than five years,” says Bondoc.
“With a single click of a button, the patient’s record is already there so we get to serve more patients, and they go home satisfied with the services,” she adds.
This story is common for many rural health centers in the Province of Iloilo, where the EMR was piloted in 2011. It has since evolved to become SHINE OS+, an open source platform that allows developers to design modules and plugins to customize it based on the needs of target communities.