MANILA, Philippines - MyHealth Clinic is embarking on a major expansion program to end the year with five mall-based clinics in Metro Manila and Metro Cebu.
Ritche Evidente, the company’s business and marketing director, said plans are underway for the development of four clinics to add to its pilot branch located in Festival Supermall in Alabang. These clinics will be linked via Telemedicine services.
MyHealth Clinic serves insurance companies, HMOs and walk-ins while also providing standard health services to the corporate market, including business process outsourcing firms and manufacturers.
“We are looking at growing the network of MyHealth Clinics by three to four a year and, in the next five years, we intend to cover most of the key regions around the country,” Evidente said.
Dr. Noel Bautista, MyHealth Clinic medical director, said “each of the clinics in the MyHealth network will be among the first to fully utilize digital technologies in patient care and Telemedicine will be among the state-of-the-art special services that our customers will have access to.”
He explained that Telemedicine is about providing access to healthcare services, from consultations to diagnosis and management, remotely and often via the Internet.
“We will soon have a portfolio of at least 200 specialists all over the country, all of them will be interfaced with each other, exchanging information and knowledge, and each of our customers will benefit from this through Telemedicine,” Evidente said.
In addition to standard services such as annual check-ups, MyHealth Clinic can hook up clinics of corporate customers to its network so that they need not hire a doctor or nurse to stay in their premises.
Through Telemedicine, MyHealth Clinic can provide corporate clients diagnostics and check-ups which allows the companies to substantially reduce costs since they do not need to hire doctors and nurses for their office-based clinics if they subscribe to the Telemedicine service.
While no specific data was given, MyHealth Clinic is investing heavily in the equipment in each of its network clinics. “Our equipment will be comparable with those of the major hospitals. In fact, we may even have technologies that others do not have,” said Bautista.
He explained that “Telemedicine is a very expensive technology, but when operated efficiently, the costs to a corporate customer will even be cheaper than hiring doctors and setting up their own office clinic on their own.”