With this growing trend, the Philippine government expects to gain around US$3 billion through the medical tourism industry by 2015, with 200,000 foreign patients arriving annually.

To integrate data in the different departments of a hospital, Hospital Operations and Management Information System (HOMIS), a data management software, is already being used in more than 40 public hospitals nationwide while some are using private systems under the publicprivate partnership (PPP) program of the government. "It would be best if we have health information systems," Crispinita A. Valdez, director of the DOH Information Management Services Division, told Computerworld Philippines in a telephone interview. "It helps if facilities that provide services to foreigners are computerized," she adds.

Open Source in Telehealth

Local e-health initiatives of the University of the Philippines Manila - National Telehealth Center (UPM -- NTHC) optimizes open source applications to provide e-medicine, e-records and e-learning. "These are our four flagship programs," says Melissa J. Pedreña, e-health nurse and training coordinator for telemedicine of NTHC. Using Frontline SMS and iPath, both free downloadable applications, queries through SMS and e-mail respectively come into their database and are forwarded to the designated medical specialist in the Philippine General Hospital (PGH).

According to NTHC's recent statistics, 43% of the SMS telereferrals have been responded to by domain experts within 15 minutes, while 48% of e-mail telereferrals were answered within 48 hours. While these systems help in providing medical solutions to patients and doctors, Pedreña believes that wider technology media will be even more effective. "Our path is [to provide] video conferencing, more than SMS and e-mail," she notes.