Dr.

Raymond Francis Sarmiento

Director and Assistant Professor

Raymond Francis Sarmiento
Biography

Raymond is currently the Director of the National Telehealth Center, National Institutes of Health, University of the Philippines Manila. In this role, he is responsible for the management of Center programs and activities as it relates to the design, development, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation of eHealth and telemedicine/telehealth initiatives in the Philippines, including standards and interoperability, health information exchange, clinical decision support, and public health surveillance. He also serves, in a joint capacity, as the Chief Data Privacy Officer of the University of the Philippines Manila and as Data Protection Officer of the Philippine General Hospital. He is an Assistant Professor of the UP College of Medicine's Medical Informatics Unit and is the current president of the Philippine Medical Informatics Society and chair of the Health Informatics for Development Working Group of the International Medical Informatics Association.

Raymond earned his Bachelor of Science in Psychology degree (cum laude) from the University of the Philippines Diliman in 2003 and Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) degree from the University of the Philippines Manila in 2008. He also completed his internship at the Philippine General Hospital (2008) before completing a biomedical informatics fellowship certificate course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 2011. He finished his medical informatics postdoctoral fellowship at the Office of High Performance Computing and Communications, Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA (2012-2014) prior to becoming a Public Health Informatics Fellow in the Division of Surveillance, Hazard Evaluations, and Field Studies at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USA (2014-2016). For his work during the 2014 Ebola emergency crisis, he and his colleagues received the 2015 CDC Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response Honor Award for Excellence in Program or Policy Evaluation. In 2016, he returned to the Philippines under the Balik (Returning) Scientist Program of the Philippines' Department of Science and Technology. Recently, he received a faculty grant award in medical informatics for outstanding research and public service from the University of the Philippines System. In 2019, he was recognized as the Outstanding Young Scientist for Public Health Informatics by the National Academy of Science and Technology of the Philippines.

Raymond currently leads a new initiative on the development and implementation of a Philippine-based electronic health information exchange system to improve data collection, storage, and analysis of patient health information in order to provide the best care for patients afflicted with a uniquely Filipino genetic disease called X-linked dystonia Parkinsonism. With almost 108 million Filipinos in the country, this rare disease affects 5,700 Filipinos locally (global disease incidence is 5.24 per 100,000). His team is currently building and deploying an interoperable health information system infrastructure through collaborative partnerships with a movement disorder specialty society, a non-government organization, and the Philippine General Hospital.

Raymond has also served as co-leader in a nationally implemented project that aims to provide Filipino medical technologists from the provinces access to diagnostic parasitology experts in order to address the gaps in knowledge and increase the accuracy of diagnosing neglected tropical diseases in the Philippines. With such a dearth of medical parasitologists in the Philippines, his team's efforts have helped increase the accuracy of diagnosed cases being treated in the remote areas, reduced the number of undiagnosed and misdiagnosed cases in the countryside, and helped improve public health outcomes by improving sanitation practices and lowering the incidence of malnutrition.