WHILE visiting a well-known private hospital in Metro Manila, I wondered whether it is possible at all for all public hospitals to have the same first-class facilities and high standards.
Perhaps I am just too naive to even think about that, knowing the present state of our public hospitals as compared to our private hospitals.
On the other hand, I have also seen how public hospitals abroad have practically the same standards as private hospitals, and perhaps even higher. Besides, I know for a fact that when taken as a whole, the government is richer than any well financed private hospital, no comparison.
What that means is that the answer to my question should be in the positive, and therefore it is just a matter of political will for the government to be able to achieve whatever high standards it wishes to reach.
For purposes of analysis, we could say that the budgets of all government agencies including the public hospitals are broken down into (1) operating expenses, (2) capital outlays and (3) miscellaneous and other expenses.
Suffice it to say, however, that the budgets of private hospitals are also broken down similarly, albeit with different titles. In theory, all public hospitals could be treated as corporations and therefore could be made subject to the rules and practices of corporate governance. In that context, all appropriations that are allocated to the public hospitals could be booked as investments, with the government in effect acting as the investor.
As it happens every fiscal year, new budgets are allocated to the public hospitals under the General Appropriations Act (GAA). What that means is that the public hospitals have an annual bonanza of new investments that the private hospitals do not even enjoy.
As many administrators of public hospitals would probably argue, they are losing money because their services are rendered for free, therefore they have no income. That argument should actually not hold any water, because for all intents and purposes, the annual budget allocations that they are receiving are in effect the equivalent of incomes, even if these are actually investments, so to speak.
More often than not, the equipment of public hospitals is antiquated, and is usually analog, therefore not digital. It stands to reason that most of their systems are done manually, therefore not computerized not automated.
Even if that is actually a problem, that could also be viewed as an opportunity from another perspective, because that creates a lot of room for them to shift to digital technologies, as a step towards computerization and automation.
As it usually happens, analog and manual systems are more expensive to operate, and therefore these would tend to increase their operating costs. The way to go therefore is for them to migrate to more efficient systems which should not be a problem for them because they have new annual outlays anyway.
Although the data is hardly available, it could be said that most public hospitals do not have their own data centers and therefore they do not have their own Local Area Networks (LANs). It also goes without saying that they do not have their own local servers and storage devices. That may sound like bad news, but there is actually good news for them, because remote hosting is now available in the internet cloud, so much so that they would not need to put up their own local data centers anymore, and therefore they also do not need to have their own local servers and storage devices.
The good news does end there, because together with the internet cloud there are other new technologies that would become available such as Big Data, Business Intelligence (BI) and the Internet of Things (IOT).
I believe that in the next few years, the majority of the bulky hospital equipment will not only become smaller, they will also become networked. By that, I mean to say that they would either be networked locally through a LAN, or remotely through the internet cloud.
As the equipment will become smaller, they will of course become cheaper, and therefore their capital expenses will go lower. One way or the other that should translate not only to having lower equipment costs and lower laboratory costs, but also to having more patients treated. With equipment costs going down, we only have to worry about the high costs of medicines and the high rates of doctor’s fees.
In all probability, smart healing in the near future will be technology driven, by way of the combination of internet based and mobile based technologies. It will also be data driven; using the individual Big Data of patients that will be processed into BI by data analytics, with data fed by IOT into remote servers and storage devices.
As it is now, mobile devices are already being recognized as the first real IOT devices, but more IOT devices will soon come out in the form of chips and sensors. The key to this all is good connectivity in the form of good bandwidth, being no other than robust broadband in the form of fiber optics.
For sure, most if not all of the handheld devices will become hardened, as in ruggedized for durability. Even now, some handheld devices are already shock proof and waterproof./PN
