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Healthcare in the Philippines definitely needs attention. Apart from the lack of tools and facilities to cure patients in both urban and rural areas, most of the public and private hospitals and clinics are still traditional means of keeping medical records – in other words, paper.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but like any other verticals, available technologies always dictate how a business could keep up, and In a healthcare setting, online collaboration tools can be conducive to improving the tracking of patient records. This is especially important in the disaster-prone Philippines, where floods, fire and other calamities can destroy paper records at the drop of a hat.

Enter HealthCloud, an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system that helps doctors, patients and health maintenance organizations (HMOs) store their data on the cloud. It recalls the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive, only that it’s tailor-fit for the healthcare industry.

Created by Philippine company LiFEDATA, its aim is to make healthcare electronic systems more scalable and affordable.

HealthCloud offers three main products, each for a different segment of the industry. HealthcCloud Doctor features a set of 15 templates designed to help doctors record patient records, HealthCloud Patient is a medical log book that helps patients manage personal data,and HealthCloud HMO is meant for use by insurance companies and other health management organizations.

LiFEDATA’s CEO Malu Simeon-Florendo points out that HealthCloud was created to improve the fragmented healthcare system in the Philippines. She adds:

>[It] makes it a lot easier for patients to avail the needed health care. It also brings down the cost structure for each player because now everyone is communicating and working efficiently in a proper system.
The three solutions will be made available in the country through Philippine telco Globe’s cloud service. All three systems will work together to provide information for the respective institutions and patients. Doctors, nurses, HMO staff and patient can access these records through desktops, laptops and mobile devices.

Globe President & CEO Ernest Cu says the reason for tapping into a solution like this is its goal to become “more than just simply being a connectivity provider” and offer more solutions for the Philippine market. And jumping into a solution for the healthcare industy is one of its moves among many others.

Globe Business Head Jesus Romero says there is a very big potential in terms of “dramatically increasing and improving the delivery of healthcare services.” The telco does not only eye its potential business impact, but also the social benefits that HealthCloud will give patients.

A number of business process outsourcing companies in the Philippines provide HMO benefits to their employees. And this segment alone have around 770,000 employees, apart from the other companies that provide similar services. In addition, not a lot of solutions for healthcare are still present, and a collaboration tool like this can be helpful. However, we’d like to see more hospitals and HMO companies tap on such available solutions. Because until a good number of these healthcare institutions act on it, we might not see a general improvement on the healthcare system.