Dr. Marcelo shares experiences from the Philippines during the Conclave’s Learning Session 7 as a panelist via Zoom

This year’s Global Learning Collaborative for Health Systems Resilience Conclave was held in New Delhi, India and online on March 10-11, 2023.

Dr. Alvin Marcelo from the AeHIN Governing Committee joined its learning session titled “Digital as Enabler; The pivotal role of robust, integrated, and interoperable health information systems in building resilience” virtually on March 11.

Dr. Marcelo concurred with the sentiment that without an identification system, it will be difficult to understand the scope of the clientele, of the public, the universality of the citizenship of everyone in the Philippines, and their inclusion into the system.

He also mentioned AeHIN’s hope to learn from India’s progress and how they are solving the challenges of national health insurance, and how these lessons can be shared back to AeHIN members.

Dr. Marcelo shared pain points from previous implementations, the importance of identity, and the value of standards. “Without standards, people will go in different directions and in different places; talking about the same thing, but applying different meanings to the same terms,” he added.

When asked about the longer term implication to support and design more resilient systems in relation to pandemics, Dr. Marcelo reiterated the importance of the AeHIN Mind the GAPS Framework:

“Governance is key to getting all the resources in synchronized form, and activating all of the solutions that are in separate departmental agencies in government. We should evaluate the past two years and come up with a blueprint for addressing disasters like that… The blueprints and the artifacts that were generated in the past two years should be easily available, accessible, and shared with everyone. Even if the pandemic signals are already down, we should look at those blueprints and always make sure that we have access to them, in case an emergency arises. We need to make sure that the people are knowledgeable about the governance structures and the blueprints during disasters… We should start using the standards routinely so that, when the pandemic hits us again, we are not looking for what standards we are going to use within the country and across the borders regionally.”

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