Healthy options as new businesses

Ateneo Professor on Entrepreneurship

Rizal Philippines   | April 30, 2013

In the consultation with Sentrep students for BP, two students proposed healthy options:   one was going to import and resell virgin olive and organic olive oil;  the other one would put up healthy restaurant. When I asked the student on healthy restaurant and asked him on:  water, cookwares and other details of healthy living, he said he had nosebleed.

One thing came out though, that both would need an organic farm as a partner.

It happened that we had a classmate (also now a senior) who has an organic farm in Jalajala Rizal

                                   Organic squash

                                         A dragon fruit farm

The problem of the lady owner are:    lack of sufficient water supply, very intensive (and therefore expensive operations)

The water supply can be solved by having solar power;   the expense level can be solved by having market/buyers connected her.  She needs to pound more on the MVP of her farm:  that it is healthy option and therefore is more expensive than those farms that use pesticides and fertilizers

Dr. Kongkiat Ketpetch, Improving Health Care through IT and Improved Nutrition

An Ateneo Graduate School of Business Advantage

Dr. Kongkiat Ketpech is a medical doctor, who had the personal mission of improving health care in Thailand.  In Thailand, you need to pay only 30 baht for any disease to be treated. But you have to pay a an annual capitation (premium) of l,200 baht.  It is challenge to do this.  So they studied how rural hospitals and the only 3 solutions were IT, IT, IT.

l.  IT project.  The idea is to get information on the hospital:  patients, number of days stay, expenses, medication etc.  Employing the best IT graduates, and using Linux,  open source software, they were able to get dashboard picture on a daily basis of hospital operation within the network.  They found out that the l,200 baht capitation was exceeded.  The actual cost was 2,400.  The budget was being eaten by chronic/lifestyle  disease, not by infectious diseases. The prevalent diseases were hypertension, obesity, diabetes, and malnutrition

2.  So he embarked as an Ashoka fellow this time, on a nutrition project.  They promoted organic food, and food low on glycemic index like brown rice.  This benefitted the farmers who were encouraged to raise organic food and or brown rice.

There is none like this in PHL.  He can be contacted at kongkiat@ipensook.com

I understand his software is being used in the Phil and maybe is being used by DOH, Philhealth to lower hospital costs and improve delivery of services