Davao City Rep. Paolo Duterte (FILE PHOTO)
MANILA, Philippines — Davao City 1st District Rep. Paolo Duterte urged his colleagues in the House on Wednesday to support a bill he authored that would institutionalize a remote patient referral system created during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He said House Bill No. 7574 — the proposed National Patient Navigation and Referral System Act — would ensure that patients would know which hospitals are available and which could handle their condition.
The system comes from the One Hospital Command that relatives of suspected COVID-19 patients used to determine which hospitals were not yet full.
The system allowed health authorities to manage hospital capacity by referring patients to other nearby hospitals if one facility is nearly full.
“The One Hospital Command, which was later called the National Patient Navigation and Referral Center (NPNRC), was used during the pandemic mainly as a means to quickly refer COVID-19 patients to available nearby hospitals and healthcare facilities,” Duterte said.
“This should be improved and expanded into a nationwide network and given sufficient funding to be an effective component of our Universal Health Care (UHC) program.”
Under the bill, which was co-authored by Benguet Rep. Eric Yap and ACT-CIS Partylist Rep. Edvic Yap, the proposed system will connect and facilitate communication between local governments, government agencies, hospitals, and other health facilities. This would also ensure that staffers of a particular health facility would not be overworked since they would not need to deal with overcapacity.
The system will also include patient navigation and referral services to the Malasakit Centers and other government and nongovernment organizations so that the government can also respond to indigent patients who need financial aid.
The bill stated that the system would also need to coordinate with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) for connectivity support, as it would need access to data like bed allocation of hospitals, utilization, manpower, specialization, and other details that may help in referring patients.
“Institutionalizing a patient navigation and referral system, which is a type of service delivery network, will ensure the continuing provision of quality care through the combination of capacities of individual health service delivery points into a unified delivery system,” the bill said.
“Now that the public health emergency due to Covid-19 has been lifted, the NPNRC can continue to function as a unit under the Department of Health (DOH) to cater to all types of patients to help them gain access to affordable medical care,” Duterte added.
“Let’s put to good use the lessons we have learned from the pandemic. Institutionalizing the patient navigation and referral system is one of them.”
After the initial wave of COVID-19 surges in 2020, several countries aimed for the resumption of business operations. However, there were a few countries that stood out with their COVID-19 response — like Asia Pacific countries Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand, and Vietnam.
Taiwan in particular was hailed for activating a system that it developed after the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in the early 2000s. That system included quarantine protocols that required visitors had to stay in hotels to ensure that were not carrying the virus,. It also had a hospital monitoring system to ensure that healthcare workers and equipment are not strained from overcapacity.
In the Philippines, the office of then-Vice President Leni Robredo also experimented with such a system, creating the Bayanihan E-Konsulta through which volunteer doctors assessed possible COVID-19 patients remotely and decide whether they should go to an emergency room and which hospital.
It served as some sort of an online triage, classifying people according to the severity of their symptoms and supporting the One Hospital Command Center at times when it was swamped.