I Visited 90 Clinics in Manila. What Doctors Told Me About Why They Started Stayed With Me.

By Hershey Morgan, Founder & CEO, MedicalPro Group Pte Ltd

Based on two weeks of field visits across 90 clinics in Manila, August 2026

Two weeks. Ninety clinics. Small, medium, and large-scale practices across Manila. I went to observe and learn.

I spent two weeks visiting ninety clinics across Manila — small solo practices, mid-sized group clinics, larger multi-doctor operations. I wasn’t there to pitch anything. I sat in waiting rooms, watched how the day actually moved, and talked to doctors and the clinic assistants who run alongside them.

Somewhere in most of those conversations, I asked why they’d chosen to build their own practice in the first place. The answers were remarkably consistent. Every doctor I spoke with pointed to something close to the same thing — they wanted to help, to make a real impact on the people in front of them, to practice medicine the way they actually believed was right. Not one mentioned money. Not one described the clinic as a business opportunity first.

A few — usually the ones who sounded the most tired that day — admitted something else too: they’d started questioning whether they’d made the right decision. Not about medicine. About the choice to run a clinic at all.

Several put it more precisely. They still loved being doctors. What they hadn’t anticipated was how much of running their own practice would have very little to do with medicine — staff schedules, billing, a vendor issue, the dozen small operational decisions an ordinary clinic day produces.

At one clinic, I watched a doctor finish a consultation and still not eat. She was waiting for the queue to clear before taking a break, and somewhere in that queue was a pregnant woman. She kept seeing patients through lunch because she didn’t want to make her wait any longer.

I went to Manila expecting to learn more about the technology clinics were missing. I did. But that wasn’t what stayed with me.

What stayed with me was how much of the clinic still depended on people simply doing more. As the clinic grew, so did everything around the medicine — the coordination, the handoffs, the questions, the things somebody had to remember. None of it looked like failure. In many cases, it was happening because the clinic was succeeding.

I came back to Singapore with a different understanding of the problem. I had gone to Manila looking closely at how clinics worked. What I came back thinking about was something more fundamental: how easily a clinic can grow away from the reason it was built.

The doctor hasn’t lost the purpose. The clinic hasn’t failed. The way the clinic works simply hasn’t grown with the clinic.

As your clinic grows, is it becoming more capable — or simply asking more of you?