Making a Difference
The finest breast cancer centre with a profit- for- charity philosophy was the dream of Dr Norman San Agustin, who relates how he made it real to Chit L Lijauco
ver since they went to grade school together at the De La Salle University, Ramon del Rosario Jnr, Jose L Cuisia, and Norman San Agustin have kept their friendship. They all took further studies abroad—one going to Wharton for an MBA, the other to Harvard, and the third choosing the medical profession at Yale. Del Rosario and Cuisia went back to the Philippines, becoming business leaders and helping their homeland whenever and however they could. San Agustin did not. He stayed in the US and continued to build a solid reputation in breast cancer medicine at Morristown Medical Centre in New Jersey. It wasn’t that he did not have a desire to help; he actually did, nurturing a dream founded on the concept of profit-for-charity. By establishing a modern breast cancer centre in the Philippines, he wanted to give the best quality of medical treatment to high- and middle-class patients, then use the profits to guarantee that low-income patients can avail themselves of the same quality of service. “Like Robin Hood,” San Agustin said with a wink.
He shared his dream with his two best friends who immediately jumped on the bandwagon, offering to give the seed money for the project. This was a cause for worry. “What if the project fails?” San Agustin asked himself seven years ago, when the dream was born. “If I fail, I will lose my two best friends!” Unprepared for this result, the doctor sought out other possible corporate partners. “I was not successful,” he said.
Last year, his two friends were at the end of their patience. “They told me, ‘Let’s do it now or never, because we are not getting any younger.’ I told them my apprehension about losing their friendship. They said, ‘You think we’ve never lost in business before? We just didn’t tell you the losses, which were actually more than the successes!’”
He was assuaged, and in a confluence of events, he later met Jose EB Antonio, chairman of the Century Group of Companies, in an event in New York City. Learning of the breast cancer centre project, Antonio invited San Agustin to set it up in his new building called Centuria Medical Makati, built for promoting medical tourism in the Philippines. Values and Features Putting the noble cause of service to the poor aside, San Agustin believes that the value of his breast cancer centre lies in its capability to provide the latest medical attention to breast cancer patients. Apart from state-of-the-art equipment and expert medical practitioners, the centre will have as its partner Morristown Medical Centre, one of the top 50 hospitals in the United States and one of the top five in the New York metropolitan area. Morristown is lending its support to the centre as well as its name. “Now, we are to be called the Asian Breast Centre at Centuria Medical in affiliation with Morristown Medical Centre,” San Agustin said. “My dream is for us to be the first breast centre outside the United States certified by the American College of Surgeons,” he says. The partnership with Morristown will enable the centre to share the expertise of the American hospital’s top doctors via regular teleconferences with their local counterparts. “A patient will therefore benefit not from just one opinion, but as many as a dozen from the best doctors here and in the US,” he added.
Privacy and comfort are also competitive features of this cancer centre. “Here, there will be no lines,” San Agustin said, “For those who opt for the high level of care, there is a private elevator that you can take from the parking lot to a quiet waiting room for your mammogram and ultrasound or other medical treatments you may need.”
With all these medical offerings, San Agustin is proud to say that the centre’s pricing is “so competitively shameful.” Where mammograms in the US cost around $650, over here it is only $100. He, however, assures