HEALTH Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire on Wednesday said the Philippine Health Insurance (PhilHealth) Corp. has already settled its balance to the Philippine Red Cross (PRC) for the conduct of Covid-19 tests.
“We already coordinated with them and actually the balance was already sent to them yesterday by PhilHealth,” Vergeire said in an online media forum, referring to the P700.2-million payment of PhilHealth to the PRC.
Vergeire also underscored the contribution of the PRC on the expanded testing efforts of the government.
“We recognize the role of Philippine Red Cross in our current capacity for testing. When we try to analyze all of the outputs that our laboratories are generating, almost 40 percent came from Red Cross,” Vergeire stressed, noting that the largest laboratories across the country belong to the PRC.
Earlier, Sen. Richard Gordon warned that they will stop conducting their Covid-19 tests if PhilHealth fails to settle its obligations to PRC.
He stressed the need of PRC to replenish the dwindling supply of the laboratories.
Higher output
With their current capacity of 40,000 tests a day, Gordon is confident that the testing output could still increase.
Gordon made the pronouncement as PRC data revealed that it has already conducted close to 500,000 Covid-19 tests since it opened its first molecular laboratory at its national headquarters on Edsa in April, at the height of the enhanced community quarantine in Metro Manila.
“We’re still on top in spite of the fact that we only started on April 14. We have conducted almost 500,000 tests. With our current testing capacity of 40,000 tests a day, we could still increase our output and do more tests daily,” Gordon added.
Gordon recalled that during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, they immediately discussed the available testing systems with medical experts because “we already believed then that testing would be the key to preventing the spread of the virus.”
PRC records show that a total of 484,151 tests have been processed in its laboratories across the country as of August 15, 2020.
Data from the Department of Health showed that in the same period, the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine ran a total of 203,577 tests, Detoxicare, 181,370 tests; Baguio General Hospital, 87,762; Chinese General Hospital, 76,094; Western Visayas Medical Center, 59,041; Jose B. Lingad Memorial Medical Hospital, 56,191; Cebu TB Reference Laboratory, 55,577; Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center, 53,244; and St. Luke’s Medical Center BGC, 45,897.
The PRC started by opening its first molecular laboratory, which has a total testing capacity of 4,000 tests a day, on April 14 on the mezzanine of its national headquarters on Edsa. This was soon followed by another one at its Logistics and Multiple Center, just behind the national headquarters, on April 29. Then, other molecular laboratories were also opened in Port Area-Manila, Clark, Subic, Batangas, Cebu, Bacolod and Zamboanga.
Meanwhile, the PRC’s molecular laboratories in Cagayan de Oro, Surigao, Isabela, Albay, Quezon, Lucena, Cotabato and Laguna are currently on different stages of completion.
“Setting up these laboratories was, and still is, hard work. When we were setting up our first laboratories, we had to charter planes to get the testing systems from China. We also had to renovate our facilities and build the laboratories in two weeks so that we could immediately conduct tests because more people were already getting infected and dying,” Gordon said as he lamented the blow to the country’s economy.
3 comments
Maari na po ba gamitin ang philhealth sa phil red cross para rt pcr swab test
Same question po, maaari po ba gamitin ang philhealth sa redcross pra po sa rt pcr swab test at ilang araw po ng release ng result o certificate?