MANILA, Philippines--Students from the Ateneo De Manila University beat four other teams to win the Philippine finals of the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition.

Team Nohako Studios will represent the country in the world finals in Cairo, Egypt in July.

The team--composed of Philip Michael Chaeng, Thomas Dy, Wilhansen Joseph Li, and Rodrick Tan?created a project called Caduceus.

Caduceus is a health information system integration platform that standardizes data of patient information.

The application can be used in one data repository but can be viewed by multiple hospitals.

The project is already being implemented in partnership with the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth).

About 3,600 entries were submitted for the competition, which started March this year.

The Imagine Cup is a Microsoft-led competition where students of programming use the software company?s applications to develop business or community software.

This year's competition has been expanded to include nine categories that cover software design and games development.

In an interview, Microsoft Philippines Software Economy Lead Tim Vergel De Dios said the entries in this year's competition were more complex compared to previous years.

He said some of the projects are utilized for specific non-government organizations and government agencies.

De Dios said Microsoft has been encouraging programming students to create applications that could help communities and organizations solve basic problems.

"There is higher complexity in this year's competition. We're also seeing that the teams are really sticking to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) being set by the United Nations. What's important is not about joining competitions but helping others as well," De Dios said.

Team Council of Green from De La Salle University-College of St. Benilde won second place, followed by Team Xception from Colegio de San Juan de Letran.

Two other schools that made it to the finals, namely Team I-Tanim from the DLSU and Team MagnIT.Co also from Colegio de San Juan de Letran.