Founded in 2020, Project Fort is a Philippine-based tech startup that uses data gathering tools to synthesize and analyze community health information, based on global best practices in public health. In doing so, the company unlocks insights that are impossible to glean on an individual level, so they can be turned into strategies for sustainable, meaningful changes on a community level.
"Our approach to community health, which is founded on public health practice and the healthy settings frameworks of the World Health Organization, recognizes wellbeing as a many-faceted equation that requires collaborations across the care continuum to champion," said Erika Modina, Project Fort co-founder and CEO. "The traditional view of health stakeholders spanning patients, providers, and insurers fails to factor in the massively influential role that employers, school administrators, and local government units play in the daily health of our communities."
With an initial focus on the workplace health setting, Project Fort caters to a largely underserved market in the Philippines. According to an ILO study published in 2021, roughly 745,000 people die annually due to poor working conditions. The study found this especially true in the Western Pacific and Southeast Asian regions. Long working hours, psychological stress, health-harming behavior to deal with that stress, and resulting strokes and heart disease were all listed as contributing factors. In the Philippines, businesses lose at least $2 billion pesos due to poor employee health. This is in spite of companies already spending roughly $3 billion trying to take care of employees.
"The takeaway here is that companies are spending their money on the wrong things because of a lack of proper insight into employee health," Modina said. "Insights that can only be gleaned, given the right tools and expertise. We believe there's a better, proactive way to care for our people."
Early in the pandemic, Project Fort played a critical role for businesses looking to build more resilient health systems for their workforces. For Ever Gotesco, a Metro Manila-based mall operator, Project Fort's daily surveillance tools flagged a possible outbreak early in July 2020. Utilizing data it had been gathering on the mall's workforce since May that year, Project Fort's health officer was able to deploy a targeted testing protocol, cutting the need to test all 3,000 tenants and direct employees down to about 30 specific individuals. In addition to cutting costs down by about 89%, this meant a speedy response that neutralized the outbreak before it even began.
"Our main challenge as a startup is establishing touch points across different healthy settings to ensure we can deliver a truly whole-of-society approach to community care," Modina said. "We began by focusing on the workplace setting, where we leveraged our data analytics to help businesses both save money and improve overall employee health. Our ultimate goal is to bring this same approach of proactive, data-driven care to the spaces communities work, live, and play. This partnership with Moraya enables us to do exactly that."
As the flagship brand for SFIO's real estate division, Moraya aims to establish itself as a global leader in wellness tourism. With an initial focus on the Philippines, Moraya actively explores new technologies in data and integrative medicine, marrying them with Filipinos' world-class hospitality, and integrating them into the beautiful natural locales of the Philippines. Over the past few months, the company has announced a number of real estate development projects, largely waterfront townships in the Philippines. By 2024, SFIO aims to complete $300 million dollars worth of these real estate projects.
To lead Moraya, SFIO CEO Jeths Lacson says the group has brought in decades of experience across wellness tourism, integrative medicine, master planning, business development, and sales. Among these industry leaders is AG Architects, an SFIO subsidiary, which has led award-winning green projects like Crowne Plaza in Changi Airport. The company also recently struck a partnership with Australia-based construction startup Luyten to bring their 3D concrete printing technologies to the Philippines. This latest partnership with Project Fort expands on the company's investments in technology as a driving force for wellness.
https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/120030