A consumer group on Wednesday called for the digital transformation of the health-care sector to address major gaps and challenges in delivering medical services amid the coronavirus pandemic.
CitizenWatch Philippines, in a news statement, said the push toward digitalization of the Philippine health sector will make health-care services more efficient and more accessible to patients.
“To effectively address these life-threatening problems, the health sector must immediately shift to digital platforms as a safe, convenient, and reliable tool for delivering health-care services to patients,” said CitizenWatch Philippines convener Orlando Oxales.
Oxales explained that with telemedicine and other digital solutions, “Patients are no longer forced to risk contact with others and [catch] potential infection when they physically visit a medical institution of a government agency.”
“Instead, services such as clinical consultation become accessible from home,” he said.
Oxales said that “integrating innovative technologies is critical in implementing health laws such as the Universal Health Care and National Integrated Cancer Control Act.”
Shifting to cloud-based technologies, he added, will boost and enhance the public health-care system benefiting the whole health-care ecosystem with solutions for big data analytics, on-demand health care, virtual reality, artificial-intelligence tools for treatment, blockchain technology for electronic health records, and other applications that should be accessible through mobile networks.
In particular, CitizenWatch Philippines called on the government to lift bureaucratic barriers that have hampered the development of the digital infrastructure for many decades.
“Public investment in digital infrastructure complemented with the right partnerships with the private sector and health-care stakeholders is the whole-of-society approach we need to overcome our health crisis,” said Oxales.
The group also cited the need to fully enforce the Ease of Doing Business law and permanently demolish red tape at the national and local levels.
The group also asked the government, particularly the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), to enable the telecom industry to help build future-proof digital infrastructure network to meet the fast-growing demand of a digitized society linking the ecosystems of government, private industries, and consumers to cloud-based services that are secure, stable and fast.
“All these can only be possible if we have a robust nationwide and future proof digital infrastructure that will deliver fast broadband services and enhance e-governance,” said Oxales.