DOH shelves vaccine self-sufficiency project

The Department of Health (DOH) is no longer keen on pursuing a public-private partnership (PPP) proposal to produce vaccines in the country, although it is open to the participation of private firms in back-end services to support the recently signed Universal Health Care Act.

“The Universal Health Care Act provides more opportunity for the private sector to expand their market reach, but at the same time, it challenges their creativity in developing value-enhancing solutions. For example, shifting investments to primary care is expected with PhilHealth (state-run Philippine Health Insurance Corp.) paying for comprehensive primary care benefit package,” Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said in a speech on Friday at a forum organized by the PPP Center and the Manila-based multilateral lender Asian Development Bank.

“The direction to contract health care provider networks raises the need for solutions or technologies that can help providers successfully achieve financial, management and clinical integration. These enabling solutions may have long been accessible to the private sector but not the public sector, so there are opportunities for government to outsource or subcontract services out,” Duque said.

Duque later told the Inquirer that private companies would be enjoined to participate in back-end health care services.

“It’s very difficult to really fathom the advantages of PPP, in the technical sense, to the improvement of the health care system, except for back-end operations, electronic medical records, applications and technology transfer. But front-end service delivery, these really are doctors, hospitals and others,” Duque said.

As such, Duque said the DOH did not have any plan to push through with the Vaccine Self-Sufficiency Project pitched but later abandoned as a PPP project by the Benigno Aquino III administration.

“Some [DOH-solicited PPP projects in the past] are vaccine production, which I think is not good. We don’t have the numbers here—India has all the huge manufacturing for vaccines and, of course, economies of scale,” Duque said.

“What can a small country like the Philippines produce, or how can it compete with India, for example, that has a global market? So if we’re just going to start, that’s going to be a lot more costly for us,” the health chief added.

Also, Duque pointed out that the earlier plan to modernize the Philippine Orthopedic Center through the PPP scheme “got botched—it was a flop.”

In his speech, Duque said the DOH’s PPP program office had attracted five solicited projects worth P13 billion on top of 19 expressions of interests.

“In order to intelligently appraise and evaluate these proposals, a health capacity development plan is currently being crafted. Priority areas are also being identified—of which primary care and information technology are foremost,” he said.

“Through these, we hope to quantify the gaps and map where private sector can bring most value. After all, it is the role of government, the DOH in particular, to ascertain that private sector is engaged strategically and responsibly and aligned towards the twin goals of the Universal Health Care Act—providing access to responsive, quality care without financial hardship,” he added.