It takes a lot to create and maintain trust among people, even more so when there are sensitive matters on the line: the health and wellbeing of patients, expensive healthcare bills, payments, and so much more. The process of trust development among stakeholders in the health community is also challenged by structural issues. Demand for healthcare far outstrips supply. Thus, most healthcare settings may be described as “toxic” with too many patients seeking care from service providers that are already overstretched. Resources in a developing country such as ours, are scarcer. Innovation and leadership will make the difference between simply expensive but still workable, or exorbitantly expensive and inaccessible to almost all but the very privileged few.

MediLink’s Role in the Health Ecosystem
MediLink Network, Inc. (MediLink), serves the healthcare community by mediating trust between counterparties in a healthcare transaction. A healthcare transaction takes place among patients, hospitals, clinics, doctors, and health insurers.

For each transaction, MediLink’s electronic network serves the interests of three major stakeholders: (1) for patients, the platform offers convenience through instant authorization for insured transactions and cashless availment; (2) for healthcare providers, transactions are authorized based on the patient’s healthcare plan benefits and paid on time; (3) for HMOs and insurers, value-added services monitor fraud and provide transparency on utilization drivers.

Each node in MediLink’s network serves as a sentinel that facilitates and monitors transactions between trusted parties. The company’s services are continually evolving to reduce fraud, inefficiency, and waste in the healthcare system.

Mediating Trust Among Counterparties
The health ecosystem is a complex web that involves many stakeholders. Each stakeholder group is dynamic. The roster of physicians, nurses and other practitioners change daily. Health facilities may open new branches, undergo name or ownership change, while others may cease operations. Companies may switch between healthcare plans from year to year. Corporations onboard and offboard employees daily.

As a gateway for health transactions, MediLink ensures that each stakeholder in a transaction is authenticated before guaranteeing transactions between them. This helps the stakeholders avoid situations where one stakeholder’s word is held against another’s. All transactions that traverse the electronic network are fully transparent and auditable, making it an objective source of truth for counterparties. Counterparties no longer have to rely on unverified verbal statements from each other, which are especially tenuous if there is no previous transaction between them before.

As a third-party network and solutions provider, MediLink is entrusted with a lot of data including the medical history of each member of our clients in the health ecosystem. The information is personal and highly confidential. To protect our clients’ data, MediLink continually maintains its certification for ISO/IEC 27001 Information Security Management, a world-class standard, alongside a strong organizational culture to maintain data privacy and information security.

Future Plans


Every MediLinker is conscious of the healthcare challenges faced by the Philippines’ health ecosystem. The company is trying to contribute to the solution in some small way by raising up new generations of highly skilled and committed team members with the desire to use their ICT skills to solve healthcare challenges. MediLink aspires to somehow influence trends in healthcare costs to become more consistent with Moore’s law, where services could grow by orders of magnitude while costs drop. Early healthcare intervention and accessible services is a key to preserving health, as a healthy populace is a foundation of a productive nation.

 

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