Our health sector is sick. It is very sick.
According to the Department of Health (DOH), the ratio of doctors to patients is now 1:33,000. It is obviously physically impossible for a single doctor to constantly monitor 33,000 patients. That means that millions of Filipinos will have no access to professional medical care. Imagine the consequences of that.
Medical professionals are among our best human exports. This means the staggering doctor-patient ratio is not about to be closed soon.
Add to the shortage of medical professionals is the sheer lack of publicly funded medical facilities. Only a few public medical facilities have fully functional emergency medical services capability. Filipinos who are suddenly ill will have to travel long to get to a suitable medical facility. If that facility is private, affordability of competent medical care becomes an issue.
An ounce of prevention, to be sure, is worth a pound of cure. But preventive health care requires regular diagnostic services. These services are not cheap. Much as many of us would want to practice self-care, doing so requires availing of diagnostic services. The costs could be prohibitive.
To overcome the shortage of medical professionals and the lack of fully functional clinics, the DOH distributed self-test kits to address epidemics. Last year, for instance, a medical equipment supplier called Philab completed delivery of one million dengue self-test kits. These kits go a long way multiplying the DOH’s capacity to diagnose possible dengue cases.
Over the succeeding period, Philab is developing self-test kits for detecting Chikungunya and Malaria. These are contagious diseases that can spread very quickly. Self-test kits will help us battle epidemics by enabling potential victims to test themselves for infection, skipping the need for an attending doctor or a functioning hospital.
Philab, by the way, is seeking to develop test kits for the use of illegal drugs. This should be helpful in the current campaign to suppress illegal drug use in the country.
Beyond the epidemics, data show that breast, lung, liver and cervical cancers are among the leading causes of death for Filipinos. There is a way to screen for possible vulnerability to certain types of cancers. It is called genomics.
Genomics is an area within genetics concerned with sequencing and analysis of an organism’s genome. The genome is the entire DNA content within one cell of an organism. “Reading” the genome enables scientists to predict medical disorders as well as customize treatment of certain diseases according to the peculiarities of one’s DNA.
Instead of a test kit screening for a particular type of disease, genomics enables medical professionals to analyze DNA in order to detect or predict the occurrence of medical anomalies in an individual. This sound like high technology, and it is. But if technology can be used to test large numbers of people very quickly, the average cost drops dramatically.
The Human Genome Project, for instance, has used equipment analyzing DNA to “map” the entire human race. This project was completed in 2003, two years ahead of schedule and way under budget. That “map” shows kinship lines along the evolution of our species. The data produced by the Human Genome Project is now publicly available on the project’s website.
The information generated by the Genome Project opens up whole continents of application. Among them is biotechnology and molecular medicine. A whole range of diseases has now become avoidable or curable. A brave new world of medicine is now opened.
The principal feature of this brave new world of medicine is that it becomes possible to screen and cure a host of diseases relying on lesser doctors for any number of patients. At first blush, this seems like a technology-sent solution for our once impossible problem of delivering medical services to a large number of underserved individuals and communities.
The Philippines is well on the way to becoming the first country in Asia to establish a state-of-the-art genomics facility. That facility, planned to be located at the Clark zone very soon, will serve a market of four billion people in East and Southeast Asia. Philab will build this facility. It is the same company that supplied dengue self-test kits to the DOH.
Philab has always been a volume player in the industry. It once formed a consortium with the DOH, the DepEd and a state-owned Chinese company China Educational Instrument & Equipment Corp. to equip 38,000 Philippine schools with math and science tools and facilities.
For its Clark facility, Philab is purchasing state-of-the-art genomics sequencing machines. This will be a major leap in the health and wellness industry. Individuals can link to the genomics facility using mobile-friendly apps.
Only a few years ago, it cost a million pesos for an individual to have his DNA tested. Now it costs P40,000 to avail of the same test. Soon enough the cost is expected to drop even more when the genomics sequencing machines are installed at Clark.
With genomics it is possible to prevent diseases even before any of the symptoms arise. This brings an entirely new meaning to self-care. We can actually have ourselves diagnosed using our smart phones.
Imagine how many will benefit from that, especially among those who currently have neither access to a medical professional nor a medical facility. Imagine how much more efficiently existing medical facilities could work using the DNA database.
Prior to this Philab project, long-distance high technology medical care might strike one as stuff from science fiction. But the technology is now here and the facility that will make diagnostics even more preventive is about to be built.