MAKATI CITY, Metro Manila- Executive Director Jaime Montoya of the Philippine Council for Health Research and Development (PCHRD) said on Thursday that as lead of the Philippine National Health Research System (PNHRS), the Council has expanded its projects to reach out peoples in communities.

In his welcome remarks during PCHRD’s 34^th anniversary celebration, Dr. Montoya cited accomplishments of the Council with regard to health research priority areas namely ICT in Health, Dengue, Drug Discovery and Development, Hospital Equipment and Biomedical Devices, and Diagnostics.

Dr. Jaime Montoya as he gives thanks to PCHRD’s partners and stakeholders

For ICT in Health, the eHealth Tablet for Informed Decision Making of LGUs (eHATID LGU) were already deployed to 343 municipalities nationwide. Its recent expansion known as the eHATID LGU Morbidity Boards in Geospatial Graphs (eHaMBinGG) will soon be available to selected provinces.

“With eHaMBinGG, LGUs will have real-time visualization and comparison of morbidity cases in the country to further aid their disease surveillance and decision making processes,” Dr. Montoya stated.

To provide health services even to the hard-to-reach communities of the country, he added, the RxBox were also already installed in 143 municipalities nationwide. RxBox is a device that captures medical signals through built-in sensors, stores data in an electronic medical record (EMR), and transmits health information via internet.

Under the Dengue Vector Surveillance program, Dr. Montoya shared that weekly monitoring of mosquito density is already operating in all 17 regions of the country with 72% of sentinel schools consistently inputting to the dengue website.

“To help control mosquito population and prevent dengue outbreak in the communities, more than a hundred thousand Ovi-Larvicidal (OL) Trap kits and four million sachet pellets were also distributed,” he added.

For the Drug Discovery and Development Program, the Bioactivity and ADMETox facility at the UP Diliman already screened more than 3,000 extracts from plants, fungi and marine organisms for possible medicinal use. The DNA Barcoding Facility has also barcoded a total of 552 plant species and already stored 150 barcoding data on an online database.

Dr. Montoya also cited that PCHRD’s partnership with the private sector has led to the developments of technologies such as the Axis Knee System and volume-cycled ventilator for both adults and kids.

The Axis Knee System, developed by the Orthopaedic International, Inc., is now available in the market at a price 40-50% lower than other commercial knee systems.

According to Dr. Montoya, “two prototypes of adult ventilators, which are promising alternatives to commercial ventilators costing around PhP3 million, were also produced. These ventilators will approximately cost PhP200 thousand only when released to market.”

Dr. Montoya further reported that the Council also supported projects such as the Biotek-M to come up with more sensitive, specific, and cost-effective tools for disease diagnosis such as on dengue.

“The lyophilized version known as Biotek-M seco kit was found to have comparable performance with the liquid version and was specific to dengue virus when tested against other flaviviruses, making it very promising for dengue diagnosis,” he explained.

Concluding his report, Dr. Montoya thanked all partners and stakeholders of the Council emphasizing that their commitment and collaborations make all cited accomplishments possible.