In the Philippines, six out of every ten patients die without seeing a doctor. Geographic isolation, prohibitive health care costs and lack of tools and skilled providers, prevent poor and marginalized communities from accessing quality health care. This seminar will discuss how the Philippines used telemedicine to enable health providers in these remote areas to provide better health services through the RxBox research program. It will also discuss the ongoing collaboration between the University of the Philippines and the University of Oxford to develop the RxBox further so that it can provide more useful diagnostic information to health providers in these areas.

St Hilda’s College is delighted to welcome the two speakers at this seminar:

Kristine Mae Magtubo is a physician who served in the rural communities of the Philippines before joining the University of the Philippines – National Telehealth Center as a university researcher. She is the project manager of the RxBox research program, and is responsible for validating the technology and ensuring its deployment and use in health facilities. She was part of the 2015 Leaders in Innovation Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Nathaniel Cruz is an electronics engineer at the Instrumentation Robotics and Control Laboratory at the University of the Philippines – Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. He developed the RxBox from an undergraduate research project to the robust system it is today. He is also a technical analyst at the Philippine Biomedical Device Innovation Consortium and works on several other different biomedical device projects.