OF COURSE this is barely what Zoe de la Torre's hospital of choice has been able to set aside for charity cases. According to its medical director Dr. Joven Cuanang, St. Luke's as a matter of policy allots 10 percent of its annual revenue for charity patients and the medical missions it conducts in the provinces. "Ten percent is what we can afford," he says, adding that the minimum the hospital has spent in a year for charity patients is P300 million. That means St. Luke's annual revenue is hitting at least P3 billion.

	STATE OF THE ART. St. Luke's Medical Center, one of the "top facilities" under the Philippine Medical Tourism Program, boasts of having the latest and most advanced medical equipment in the country. Above is the hospital's 3-Tesla Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine, currently the most advanced equipment for medical imaging and disease diagnosis. [photo courtesy of St. Luke's Medical Center]

A share of that income comes from foreigners who now take up some 10 percent of the hospital's total patient load. "Patients from the Micronesian islands come here for practically almost any service — from a simple wellness check-up to a very complicated coronary artery bypass," says Cuanang. "We offer services that are usually not offered in Palau Island or even Saipan so they come here."

Unlike NKTI, however, this is not a recent occurrence; Cuanang says St. Luke's is probably one of the first hospitals in the country that was already into medical tourism even before the term was coined. He says many of St. Luke's foreign patients request — and get — extra assistance, such as airport transfers and hotel bookings, as well as shopping and beauty parlor visits.

The hospital recently built an International Patient Center, which is meant as the first stop for its foreign patients. Each patient who goes there gets a team of doctors for an initial assessment of his or her condition, plus a personal associate and, if there is a need for one, even an interpreter. St. Luke's also promises to meet all reasonable travel, salon, spa, and laundry needs of its foreign patients.

It's not surprising then that St. Luke's was among the first hospitals the government approached when it began hammering out what would become the country's medical-tourism program. Yet when asked about the government's request for participating private hospitals to increase their charity capacity by 10 percent, St. Luke's officials seem to be caught off-guard.

Eventually, however, Cuanang offers a gracious reply: "We are fully committed to the medical tourism development program of the DOH in all its aspects, including the social service side of it. As a matter of fact, our social service program is one of the most significant charity programs in the country. Our charity work is equivalent to the operations of a medium-scale hospital or two. And we intend to keep that part of our operations growing as we go along."