Keeping doctors well-informed

For cardiologist Ludgerio Torres, every patient is a special case whose ailment he must research on.

"Oftentimes, a doctor’s practice of his profession revolves around seeing his patients. This leaves very little time to devote to other tasks such as further study and research," said Torres, who is the medical director of the Philippine Heart Center. "With research, you get the latest information and your choices of treatment become more extensive."

These days, Torres can do his research within the hospital, which recently partnered with Merck Sharp & Dohme Phils. in opening a branch of the MSD Resource Center, an integrated learning center designed for doctors who want to stay ahead in their field of specialization.

The MRC at the Philippine Heart Center is the fifth outlet in Metro Manila. There are four other outlets, two of them in Davao, elsewhere in the country.

"Each of the MRCs have an outreach component. This means the MRC at the Heart Center doesn’t just serve the Heart Center but the entire Northern Luzon as well," said MSD corporate affairs director Christine Liwanag.

Filling A Gap

The MRC is the brainchild of MSD managing director Michael Harris, who has been in the Philippines the same number of years as MSD. (After an absence of 20 years, US-based MSD returned to the Philippines in 1995).

"Mik Harris saw a gap in the information access of physicians that MRC could fill. The growth in evidence-based medical information, what we call medical informatics, is phenomenal," said Liwanag.

It was, however, Tony Dans, vice-chairman for research of the Department of Medicine of the University of the Philippines-Philippine General Hospital, who put bricks and mortar to Harris’ idea.

MSD’s initial investment for each MRC is P1 million. The investment covers the cost of four to five internet-ready computers, a printer and a medical literature search engine.

For the nine MRCs nationwide, there are seven full-time research officers who help fellows, residents, consultants and students track relevant articles from medical journals and books all over the world and to download the full text. For exotic diseases, researchers are linked up with experts based at MSD’s headquarters in New Jersey.

All of MRC’s services are free of charge.

Rene Alagadan, a senior fellow at the Philippine Heart Center, has, however, placed the annual savings of regularly using the MRC at about P120,000.

"For doctors, the monetary savings is dwarfed by the opportunity costs saved," said Dans. "The value exceeds cost savings computation in terms of time saved by the doctor and the improvement in patient care. For example, if a patient takes the right medicine for his ailment for the rest of his life, the value in terms of the patient’s quality of life is much greater."

Commitment

From the start, the MRC project was placed under Liwanag and her team. "What we don’t see this as a means to directly sell our products to physicians. We want to do is keep physicians well-informed so they can make better decisions that can save more lives," she said.

Today, MRC has 8,000 active members from the medical community. It also has about 15,000 under its Patients Club. "These are patients enrolled in MRC by their doctors. These patients want to be more actively involved in his/her treatment and use our facilities to find out the latest medical treatments," said Liwanag.

So successful is the Philippine pilot that MSD has put up MRCs in China and Taiwan in Asia and in Romania in Europe.

George Merck, who found Merck & Co. more than 100 years ago on the vision that "medicine is for the patient, not for profits", would have liked that.