WHERE IS OUR ORGAN DONATION DATABASE SYSTEM?

WHERE IS OUR ORGAN DONATION DATABASE SYSTEM?

To my fellow Filipinos: In fairness to the DOH, I am not going to say yet that we do not have an organ donation database system yet. Instead, I will just pay for now that I could not find it yet, even if it probably exists somewhere in the bureaucratic maze of the government. I asked a contact at DOH where it is now, and he referred me to someone who is supposedly in charge of it now. When I sent her a text asking about her about where it is now, she said she will ask her ICT staff where it is. Apparently, her own staff is still looking for the database up to know. Is it simply missing, or maybe it does not actually exist at all?

For some reason, both the Philippine Organ Donation and Transplantation Program (PODTP) and the Philippine Network for Organ Sharing (PHILNOS) are difficult to search both in Google and in Facebook. That is the reason why I suspect that one or both are not operating fully as they should, or the people in charge of them are simply not too keen on being active in social media. The way these two are organized, PHILNOS is supposed to be under the supervision of PODTP, and both are under the DOH.

That is too bad, because is an organ donation database system really exists, the medical profession and the public should be able to contact it 24x7x365 via any available means, such as via call, text, email and social media. That is so, because the process of locating and delivering a human organ is a mission critical operation. The usefulness of a human organ is time bound, and it deteriorates very quickly. And so is the window of time that is available on the part of the recipient of the donated organ.

This organ donation database system is somehow an unfinished business for me. It was a project of a Singaporean company that used to be my client as a mobile application development consultant, but the project fizzled out when the company closed. My former developers still have the source code up to now, and that is why we still feel the burden of finishing app this for the good of the country.

Although I do not have the details yet right now, I suspect that the information about organ donation that is shown at the back of our driver’s license cards are not yet connected to an organ donation database system yet, if ever there is one already. Again, feeling the burden of an unfinished business, I am volunteering to assist both the LTO and the DOH to jointly build this database once and for all.

To put it simply, all drivers are supposed to check on their drivers’ licenses whether they want to donate their organs or not, in case of death. In case that happens, someone should notify PODTP or PHILNOS that donated organs are available. The system, once there is one, should either transport the organs to an organ bank, or to a hospital’s operating room where the organ could immediately be transplanted into a waiting recipient. Very truly yours, IKE SENERES/11-13-24

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