Healthcare ‘pautang’ at your fingertips
Even if you are penniless at the moment, you can buy your whole sevenday antibiotic course by borrowing money from SureServ.
Imagine being broke and suddenly experiencing symptoms that needed an immediate consultation with a doctor or an x-ray, or perhaps you were prescribed with expensive antibiotics. Where do you get the money? A new healthcare app called SureServ — taglined “The Lending Hand for Healthcare” — aims to provide a solution to this predicament.
Targeted at “the working class” in the third world country of the Philippines, the app acts as an emergency lender for employed individuals — or freelancers — who do not have an HMO card or friends and family to help them out.
Think of it as a “pautang” or an app that acts like a credit card designed for health services when you are out of cash. In simpler terms, it acts like a GCash app — except the money reflected in your app is not yours. It’s a loan.
It is the first of its kind in the Philippines.
you go to an app’s partner drugstore for your urgent antibiotics (for example, you have a tooth abscess). And even if you are penniless at the moment, you can buy your whole sevenday antibiotic course by borrowing money from SureServ.
Scan the QR Code, input the amount for the 14 capsules, and voila! Rest assured that your tooth abscess will not progress to sepsis or meningitis.
Officially called a “microfinance app,” the objective of SureServ’s “closed-loop online lending” model is to become your ever-ready loaning app for your sudden health needs.
“We do not give out cash. We give out credit through your mobile phone. you can think of SureServ as a credit card on your mobile phone,” said SureServ’s chief president and founder Johnny Bondoc at a recent media launch.
As long as you have a smartphone, a wi-fi and working fingers, you can easily reach through your pocket and borrow money for medical treatment or health maintenance. That is, if you get approved after submitting several documents to the app, such as your payslip, government ID, proof of billing and other requirements.
The app has been around since 2019 and, according to Bondoc, it has benefited manufacturing, manpower, retail, SMe and BPO employees from private corporations.
The services that you can access are similarly offered for free in your barangay health center: vaccines for your baby, medicines, clinic services — except perhaps for slightly more expensive services and specialized consults and diagnostics that your local government unit cannot provide in a timely manner.
you have to turn on your notifications for SureServ at all times because the app will remind you to pay back your loan every 11th and 26th of the month. This is so you won’t forget to pay the money you borrowed on your pay day — either on the 15th or 30th of the month.
If you are a full-time employee, you may pay SureServ back through salary deduction.
For a newbie app user, you can borrow money up to P3,000. If you pay your loan on time, the credit you can borrow might increase up to P8,000.
you will, however, receive an error message if you try to purchase a fancy coffee or for fried chicken for dinner with the app. It will only work with health needs under Aventus Medical Care, Healthcube, MyHealth Clinic, new World Diagnostics, Capitol Medical Center, LDR Medics Inc, Medexpress, Mediclick, Southstar Drug, and Rose Pharmacy — and partners might grow.
Bondoc remarked: “This opportunity to uplift our kababayan’s health care and financial situation is too good of a mission to not pursue, that we simply need to say, ‘why not.’ The SureServ solution is simply too good. We need to pursue this mission.”