Dear Mr. President: Electronic Medical Records (EMR) are needed by doctors so that they could correctly diagnose a patient’s ailment. Without complete and accurate medical records, a doctor will never know what ails a patient, and without the right diagnosis, the doctor will not be able to prescribe any procedures or medicines. The problem is, most of the medical records today are in paper forms, and are kept by doctors in their own file folders stashed away in their own filing cabinets.
In theory, the owners of the medical records are either the doctors and/or the clinics where the doctors work. There could be a duality there, because many doctors own their own clinics, and so they own their own records. While there could be no problem with that on a “one to one” basis (one doctor to one patient), there is a problem if it is already on a “one to many” (one patient to many doctors). That is so because often, a doctor would not share his or her patient’s medical records (meaning the data) with another doctor, not unless they know each other, perhaps.
The other problem with that is that whenever there are at least two doctors, not one of them actually “sees the forest”, because both or all of them are “looking at the tree”. In other words, there is no single “conductor” for the entire “orchestra”. That could be a problem, because duplications or overlaps of medicines could happen, or much worse than that, conflicts or counter reactions between one or two medicines could happen. In this scenario, the “family doctor” or any “general practitioner” could become the “conductor” or the “coordinator, but that also rarely happens.
I would imagine that most of the middle class and upper-class people would have their own “family doctors” who are probably “general practitioners” in most cases. However, I would not hesitate to say that most if not all the lower-class people do not have their own “family doctors”, so to speak. As a matter of fact, some of them may not be able to see a doctor at all in their entire lifetimes. Their only chance of seeing a doctor perhaps, when they visit a public hospital or clinic.
Mr. President, the problem is, in most cases perhaps, and almost always, there are no doctors that are available at the Barangay Health Centers (BHCs) who could check on the health condition of the patients. The other problem, Sir, is that it appears that there are no medical records of the patients that are kept at the BHCs, neither in paper form nor in digital form. What that means, Sir, is that most patients who go to the BHCs could not be diagnosed properly, which in a way is a violation of their rights to universal healthcare.
Mr. President, there are already many EMR software options that are available in the market today, some of these are on a subscription basis only, such that there is no more need for a complicated procurement process. I believe, Sir, that requiring the use of EMR in public hospitals and clinics is part of your digitalization advocacy, but perhaps the DOH and the DILG has not realized that yet. I think that one way or the other, the DILG should also be responsible for upgrading the services of public hospitals and clinics within their localities.
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