The Department of Surgery of Davao Doctors Hospital (DDH) has agreed to impose a relaxed billing scheme to patients urgently needing surgery referred by Southern Philippines Medical Center (SPMC).
According to SPMC chief of hospital Dr. Leopoldo Vega, the “No Balance Billing (NBB)” scheme enables the vulnerable sectors of the program such as the poor and the elderly to pay no more in excess of their PhilHealth coverage when confined in government facilities.
Vega said in a text message to Edge Davao that DDH has responded to his call for private hospitals in Davao City to accept indigent patients that are being catered by SPMC. He said they already signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with DDH.
“Davao Doctors has responded and we already have a MOA. We will start with the dept’ of surgery” Vega said.
Vega said both parties have agreed that once referrals are sent by SPMC, DDH will accept up to the time when SPMC starts accepting non-COVID patients again.
Vega made his call to private hospitals due to SPMC can no longer accommodate non-COVID patients since it was identified as subnational laboratory for COVID-19 in Mindanao by the Department of Health-Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (DOH-RITM) to assist the national reference laboratories in surveillance and outbreak response against COVID-19, the new coronavirus 2019.
Vega is reaching out to other private hospitals to start catering indigent patients particularly those who need surgeries and operations on a “no balance billing” scheme.
“It is the only way that we can help out these indigent patients who can no longer be admitted at SPMC because of the many positive and non-COVID probable cases that we have right now,” Vega said. “Because we want to concentrate now on COVID patients and so that we can allocate our human resources and PPEs.”
