MANILA, Philippines — “Is this another case of ‘WellMed dialysis scam’ in the making?”
Senator Panfilo Lacson posed this question on Tuesday as he bared “inconsistencies in the claims” of a dialysis company who was linked to alleged anomalies in the release of funds through Philippine Health Insurance Corp.’s (PhilHealth) interim reimbursement mechanism (IRM).
“We got hold of a document showing the inconsistencies in the claims of six branches of B. Braun Avitum,” Lacson said as the Senate resumed its investigation into fresh allegations of corruption within PhilHealth.
“The data set was culled from PhilHealth’s own tracking system called MIDAS, or Machine Learning Identification, Detection and Analysis System, which suggested that the deviation in their regression models tells us the possible presence of ghost dialysis patients, if not ghost dialysis machines,” he added.
In the Senate’s hearing last August 11, senators questioned the release of P45 million in cash advances to B. Braun Avitum through PhilHealth’s IRM, which were specifically allocated for hospitals treating COVID-19 patients.
B. Braun was also linked P9.7 million wrongly credited by some PhilHealth regional officials to a rural bank in Bataan.
According to Lacson, B. Braun was able to receive claims from PhilHealth amounting to P811 million from 2015 to 2018.
“But that is just half of the story,” he said.
The senator disclosed that in 2018, the “sessions to capacity ratio” of 15 dialysis machines in B. Braun Avitum’s dialysis center in Quezon City reached 133.78 percent.
“Samantalang 90 percent lang dapat ang threshold capacity or 72 sessions per month ayon sa PhilHealth. Ang ibig sabihin nito, may imposibleng dialysis sessions na umaabot sa 4,378. Now I dare ask – is this another case of ‘WellMed dialysis scam’ in the making?” Lacson said.
B. Braun had earlier responded to claims it was tied to alleged anomalies in PhilHealth.
In a statement last August 13, the company maintained that it holds itself “strictly to the highest standards of integrity in all its business dealings.”
Further, B. Braun Avitum said it is “one with the government in its quest for transparency and good governance,” adding that it is willing to extend its “full cooperation in this endeavor.”