Philippines PhilPEN Program

The Philippine Package of Essential Noncommunicable Disease Interventions, introduced by the Department of Health through Administrative Order 2012-0029 as the country's own adaptation of the World Health Organization's PEN package of cost-effective interventions for primary care settings. PhilPEN gives community health centers a standardized risk-prediction chart and clinical service pathway for identifying patients at risk of noncommunicable diseases, chiefly hypertension and diabetes, and for guiding their subsequent management within a primary-health-care-based system rather than requiring referral to specialist care. The program is periodically carried out as a region-wide Mass PhilPEN exercise assessing large numbers of people for NCD risk factors at once, and later implementing guidelines formally institutionalized PhilPEN's integrated hypertension and diabetes management protocol across the country's primary health care facilities.