PhilHealth database still contains records of 4M deceased members, Ledesma says

Approximately four to five million deceased Filipinos are still in the database of the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth).

This was disclosed by PhilHealth President and CEO Emmanuel Ledesma, Jr. as he mentioned the challenges in developing the state insurance firm’s website at a Senate hearing on bills on e-governance on Wednesday.

“The thing with the PhilHealth database is, my understanding is we have to clean it up because I think there are around 4-5 million people who have already passed away, but hindi pa po natatanggal sa database (they have not been deleted from the database),” Ledesma said.

The PhilHealth official told the Senate panel that they had already coordinated with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) to fix this.

The same hearing also tackled the recent cyberattacks on various government agencies’ websites, including the recent infiltration of DICT’s test site.

DICT Undersecretary Jeffrey Ian Dy said the incident happened after it “was left open.”

“That website contains nothing. It was a test site that we used for checking vulnerabilities kasi we also have our own vulnerability assessment and penetration testing. So siguro ang unfortunate lang is that after the testing it was left open. But we assure the public there's really nothing there….it really contains no data,” Dy said.

This incident came after a series of hackings of government websites were reported. —VAL, GMA Integrated News