Health Care
Using 3G Technology to Improve Health Care and Create Healthier, Happier Communities in the Philippines

The Philippine Field Health Service Information System (FHSIS) is the government’s major resource for managing public health data. Data from the system is used for policy analysis and planning at all levels of the public health system. Most of the data originates during patient care at barangay health stations, city health centers, rural health units (RHUs) and hospitals. It is up to the doctors, nurses and other health care providers at these facilities to treat patients, record their information and assemble clinic-wide reports. An electronic medical record (EMR) system has the potential to improve access to quality patient records for clinicians and data to the FHSIS.

Impact

• As of March 2014, the WAH platform has:
  • Been successfully adopted in 68 clinics in 14 provinces in the Philippines, serving more than 2,500 patients a day.
  • More than 950 clinicians who have been trained on the platform and confirmed improvements in their ability to generate reports and retrieve/store information.
  • More than 1 million patient consultations and 500,000 patient records that have been recorded.
• Patient care has improved and patient visits have increased as they are handled more efficiently, having reduced the four to five minutes needed to search paper records to just seconds.
• The ability to easily view, record and share patient information across multiple computers within a health clinic allows clinicians to complete patient consultations earlier in the day in order to provide more support to community health workers.
• Local governments are committed to sustaining WAH and have incorporated it in their budgets, including allocations for mobile devices, personnel and system maintenance.
• Stakeholders are collaborating to make the WAH platform a stand-alone, open-source, communal health information system across the Philippines that complies with the standards of and inter-operates with the health information platform of the Department of Health (DOH) and the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth).
• WAH has expanded the CHITS EMR platform that supports data collection and reporting from the barangays through the mobile midwife platform and sends patient alerts through the Synchronized Patient Alert Via SMS feature.