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GenoMed, LaSalTech sign pact for preventive medicine ventureBACOLOD CITY, May 25, 2009 (Asia Pulse Data Source via COMTEX) -- Bacolod internet services firm LaSalTech has been tapped by GenoMed, a US-based disease management company, as anchor partner in a venture that will introduce preventive molecular medicine to the Philippines and later to other parts of the world. The GenoMed-Filipino venture will include GenoMed, Inc., a public US company, and LaSalTech Inc., a private Philippine company, their joint statement said. Dr. David Moskowitz, GenoMed chief executive officer, arrived in Bacolod recently to sign a memorandum of understanding with LaSalTech represented by its chairman Bro. Rolando Dizon. "The venture will include GenoMed's protocols to keep diabetic and hypertensive patients off the kidney machine, a telecommunication company to help us market and deliver our medical advice by cell phone, call centers to answer patients' questions in real time, and a generic drug company to offer the drugs we use at a low enough price for even the poorest Filipino to afford,? Moskowitz said in a statement. He identified Globe Telecom Inc. as the telecommunications company that will help deliver GenoMed protocols by cellphone, and a catastrophic hospitalization insurance company as another potential partner. Late last week, they began talks with additional potential partners, including a generic drug company and a chain of retail pharmacies. ?In the future, we'd like to add a network of discount physicians, clinical laboratories, dentists and optometrists. Retail pharmacists could check patients' blood pressures if doctors were too busy," Moskowitz said. Dizon said LaSalTech is assisting GenoMed in the organization and management of the venture, including tapping of potential partners. ?LaSalTech will support David?s group to get things started,? he said, adding that the GenoMed-LaSalTech partnership is historic, and would be part of initiatives to make Negros Occidental go beyond its monocrop economy. ?We have to take very aggressive efforts in developing industries not dependent on sugar,? Dizon said. For its part, GenoMed has acknowledged in its statement that foreign companies like theirs are limited by the Philippine law to a maximum of 40-percent ownership of any joint venture. "If we succeed at a state-of-the-art, prevention-based healthcare solution for even the poorest Filipino, we will be able to export it to other countries, especially the US President Barack Obama has called for just such a solution. "Unfortunately, I haven't found a single American partner despite a decade of searching,? Moskowitz said. But in the Philippines, he said, he has found many potential Philippine partners after only a month. Last month, GenoMed has announced that it has been in discussions to purchase Offshore HRM, a medical coding company which recently established a 200-person call center in Bacolod. Moskowitz said GenoMed is engaged in two major activities, managing patients and doing research, and Offshore HRM will allow their company to manage patients on a large scale, and help them market to patients in the Philippines where there is an extremely high prevalence rate of diabetes. Offshore HRM, which recently trained the Philippines? first five medical coding professionals, will also recruit Filipino physicians and nurses and train them in GenoMed's algorithms to take care of paying patients. |