MPIC eyes several Manila hospitals

MANILA, Philippines - Metro Pacific Investments Corp. (MPIC) is in talks with several Manila-based hospitals for possible equity investments or outright acquisition, the company’s top official said.

MPIC chairman Manuel Pangilinan told The STAR that in zeroing in on a possible new hospital acquisition, “it has to be a tertiary hospital and the potential to expand it must be there.”

He earlier said MPIC wants to acquire a hospital in the city of Manila to add to the company’s growing number of Metro Manila-based hospitals.

MPIC’s hospital group currently includes Makati Medical Center (MMC), Cardinal Santos Medical Center, Davao Doctors Hospital Inc. (DDH) and Riverside Medical Center Inc. (RMCI) in Bacolod.

The group reported an aggregate core income of P181 million in the first half this year, 25 percent lower than the P242 million profit in the same period last year. MPIC is the local investment arm of Hong Kong-based industrial conglomerate First Pacific Co. Ltd.

MPIC officials explained that aside from the fact that the 2009 results were unusually high due to the H1N1 virus that hit around the second quarter of last year, the decrease in core income was primarily traced to reduced enrollees and revenues in the group’s three nursing college subsidiaries in Davao, Makati and Bacolod.

Medical Doctors Inc. (MDI), the owner and operator of MMC, incurred higher operating expenses arising from increases in personnel, outsourced manpower services and depreciation on the hospital’s new annex building and newly-acquired equipment.

The same also holds true with wholly-owned subsidiary Colinas Verdes Hospital Managers Corp., operator of the Cardinal Santos Medical Center in San Juan though these additional expenses were offset to some degree by increased earnings due to growth in outpatient revenues and rental income, the MPIC officials added.

Core income at DDH decreased mainly due to lower revenues from its wholly-owned subsidiary Davao Doctors College.

RMCI, the largest hospital in Bacolod and the fourth premiere hospital to join MPIC’s growing nationwide hospital chain, was consolidated starting June 1, 2010.

With the addition of 321 beds from RMCI MPIC now has in excess of 1,300 beds, making it the largest hospital group in the country, with operations in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao.

Earlier, MPIC executive director Augie Palisoc, Jr. said they are eyeing P10 billion in revenues and P1 billion in profit on a target bed capacity of 3,000 in five years’ time.

Palisoc said they are continuously on the watch for new hospitals to acquire after MPIC increased its network of hospitals to four, with the acquisition of Riverside Medical Center in May this year.

He revealed that they hope to acquire another hospital before the end of the year, though he declined to identify the target.

MPIC is in talks for a possible new acquisition in North Mindanao, Visayas and in North Luzon for added hospitals. “For the province, we are looking at hospitals with a bed capacity of about 150. But hitting our target bed capacity may take some five years,” he also said.

The group will also be soon sharing cutting-edge medical expertise through tele-medicine.

MPIC said the platform for telemedicine, anchored on the three hospitals it currently runs, will be in place in three years if everything works out.

MMC has a telemedicine facility which was loaned by Stanford’s International Medical Services (IMS) in California on an open-ended basis since 1991.

Experts at both hospitals can make diagnosis and come up with the most effective cures and treatment without leaving their workplace. Initially, this was done through the telephone. Advances in communications now make it possible to swap results of tests and other sophisticated data such as images from X-rays and MRIs. Surgeries and other procedures can now also be observed from a distance as they are taking place.

This is the system with which MPIC aims to connect its hospitals, possibly through sister company Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT).

Palisoc said the telemedicine plan is now in the advanced conceptual stage.

The PLDT Group is looking at electronic healthcare, or utilizing telecommunications to bring sophisticated healthcare even to the most remote communities. The group owns SPi Global, a business process outsourcing (BPO) company that handled clients in the healthcare business.

 “Indeed, telemedicine can help in the remote management of serious diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular and pulmonary problems. It can keep people at home or at work, and out of hospitals,” Pangilinan, who also chairs PLDT, said.