ONLINE MEDICAL CONSULTATIONS

ONLINE MEDICAL CONSULTATIONS

Dear Mr. President: Perhaps it started during the Covid 19 epidemic, but online medical consultation is now available in our country, at least to those who could afford it. As I see it, this goes against our national goal of providing universal access to healthcare to everyone, rich and poor. Apparently, there are two reasons why this anomaly occurs. The first reason is that our public hospitals and clinics are not equipped to provide online consultation services, or they are simply not allowing it, for one reason or another. The other reason is that PHILHEALTH still does not allow the refund of online consultations, again for one reason or another.

Personally Mr. President, I do not blame PHILHEALTH for not yet allowing the reimbursement of online consultations, because it has fallen victim to some scams before, such as the cataract reimbursement scam. While it appears that we have not run out of scammers in this country, which is the bad news, the good news is that there are now several information and communications technology (ICT) products and services that could frustrate or prevent the malicious attempts of scammers and even hackers.

The key to solving this problem, Mr. President, is to verify or validate the identity of either the patient or the doctor or both. To be able to do that, there are many available technologies such as multifactor authentication such as biometric data, one-time passwords (OTPs), thumbmarks and secret questions. Biometric data can be in the form of facial recognition, voice recognition, retinal recognition and even gait recognition. Lesser forms of authentication that could also be used are quick response (QR) codes, bar codes and near field communications (NFC) signals.

As the saying goes Sir, for every problem, there is a solution. Mathematically speaking, it is not even a problem if it could not be solved. Technically speaking, there is no data security problem that could not be solved. As it is the practice in the industry now, the entry level is two-factor authentication, but the multifactor authentication could be two or more, depending on the level of data security that the client wants to install.

Weighting the pros and cons, I believe Mr. President that since the database of PHILHEALTH could already be protected by multifactor authentication, there are already sufficient reasons for you to instruct DICT, DOH, PHILHEALTH, the National Privacy Commission (NPC) and the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) to work together and to plan what course of action to take. If and when necessary, Sir, perhaps you could issue an Executive Order to settle this matter once and for all?

In the event Sir, that the five agencies mentioned here would need some technical assistance, I would be very much willing to mobilize the private sector to help the government, just as I have done before to implement the National Crime Information System (NCIS) and the Citizen’s Complaint Center (Project 8888). As of now, I already have a team of ICT experts that are willing to help the government with this project, if you would allow them. IKE SENERES/10-24-2024

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