Benefits system designed to monitor health in LGUs

Municipal and city health officers will no longer manually monitor the type of out-patient diagnostic procedures that sponsored members of the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation avail themselves of at Rural Health Units.

This after PhilHealth and GlaxoSmithKline Foundation, Inc. introduced the Out-Patient Benefits System which replaces the monitoring sheet that municipal and city health officers manually fill out and submit at the end of every month to enable the processing of the capitation fund that the local government units are entitled to, says Lorna Fajardo, acting president and chief executive officer of PhilHealth.

The computer system was developed under the Family Health and Wellness Program that PhilHealth is jointly undertaking with GlaxoSmithKline Foundation, Inc.

Fajardo said that this new development will make benefits monitoring and analysis possible in real time. It will also monitor the participation of indigent members and non-members in health education seminars organized by the health centers or RHUs.

The OP Benefits System has both web-based and client server applications to ensure that data encoding, processing and transmission will be very convenient for personnel of the selected RHUs and health centers.

These applications will also ensure uninterrupted operation while safeguarding the data on members' benefits availment.

For RHUs and health centers in the project sites that do not have Internet access yet, the GlaxoSmithKline Foundation, Inc. will be providing free subscription for one year. At the same time, the foundation will roll out the brand new central processing units with built-in CD-ROM and internal modem for all project sites. - Jasmin R. Uy