MANILA - A joint House committee on Tuesday approved Speaker Lord Allan Velasco’s House Resolution No. 1536 which urged the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-MEID) to establish a unified national contact tracing protocol amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The House Committees on Health and Information and Communications Technology approved the measure in a joint hearing earlier in the day.

The resolution pointed out that local government units (LGUs) had a hard time in initiating contact tracing in their respective localities because the COVID-19 database lacks fundamental data such as phone numbers and full addresses, among others.

“As a result, numerous third parties offered disparate free contact tracing solutions, usually through mobile apps that require people to own smartphones while some establishments continued to offer manual registration to non-smart phone users,” the resolution read.

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The resolution also noted that IATF’s Resolution No. 85 prescribed the use of StaySafe.Ph platform as the official management and monitoring app for government offices and LGU’s but some sectors, including the tourism industry participants, preferred SafePass over StaySafe.

Talino Venture’s SafePass, developed by Talino Venture, is a COVID-19 prevention and incident management platform for all businesses. This was adopted by the IATF since last year.

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“Disparate apps and non-centralized data repository [lead] to redundant products, cost duplication and less effective solutions often due to limited data access,” the resolution said.

The resolution also noted poor interconnection and data sharing between solution providers and the central database maintained by the Department of Health.

It also cited data showing that the country is only able to identify at least 7 contacts per individual infected with COVID-19 when the ideal contact tracing ratio should be 1:37 for urban areas and 1:30 for rural areas.

The same resolution also seeks the designation of a government agency or body as the centralized repository of information to facilitate a faster health emergency response system, a secure, encrypted transmission of data, a unified data procedure for solution providers, compliance with the Data Privacy Act, and the provision of real-time data access to accredited contact tracing app providers.

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‘GREAT DISPARITIES, INEFFICIENCIES’

Before the approval, House Committee on Health Chair Helen Tan said the country’s COVID-19 contacts database “has shown great data disparities and inefficiencies.”

This, she said, was manifested in the “uncontrolled” incidence of COVID-19 cases, threatening the country’s health care capacity.

An efficient contact tracing system, she said, would also be the Philippines’ “key strategy” in preventing future COVID-19 infections.

Meanwhile, Eric Tayag, director of the Bureau of Local Health Development and the National Epidemiology Center, urged the DOH to house and collate all the necessary data.

“It is recommended that the DOH shall be the personal information controller for all health and health-related data, the DICT (Department of Information and Communications Technology) to oversee the systems and develop systems that are necessary to ensure seamless flow of data, and DILG (Department of the Interior and Local Government) to deploy these technologies,” said Tayag.

“LGUs who have invested in technologies to supplement their contact tracing efforts must adopt privacy measures to foster public trust. All contact tracing apps and technologies to supplement contact tracing efforts must be registered,” the official added.

Contact tracing czar Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong, for his part, conceded that the presence of many contact tracing applications could be confusing.

Magalong said the government has acknowledged StaySafe.ph as the national contact tracing application. He said this is because they put time and investment in developing the said application.

“Once we adopted it, suddenly here comes different types of applications. And we don’t blame the LGUs if they came out with their own digital contact tracing applications, provided na ang guidance sa kanila is for them to integrate their contact tracing apps with Stay Safe para isa lang ang pupuntahan ng data to make sure this data is safe, well protected and does not violate our data privacy apps,” he said.

StaySafe CEO David Almirol told lawmakers that the app now has 8 million users and their target is to hit 15 to 20 million users in the next 5 months.

They feel demoralized, however, because of the government’s supposed lack of support and conflicting information from other government agencies.

Without a national implementation plan, he said, the application can only do as much.