Latin America generates the space available for Digital Health to revolutionize the branch of medicine and ensure the interests of patients and doctors. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) opened a new chapter to connect the ICT ecosystem with a tool designed to manage and use medical data in order to boost the development of public health.
The health information systems (IS4H), were renewed to improve the quality of their operation and ability to store structured data so that they complement each other, this with the aim of optimizing public health services.
The Pan American Health Organization was in charge of activating this strategy, it consists in innovating, within Latin America, regarding the management of its digital platforms, information exchange and Digital Health.
The governments of Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Suriname, Ecuador, Cuba, Paraguay, Dominican Republic, United States, Costa Rica, Brazil, Guyana, United Kingdom / British Virgin Islands, Canada, Honduras, Jamaica, Uruguay and Puerto Rico will respect the guidelines that this plan indicates. And in this way, develop a tool that operates in an interconnected and interoperable way between the various systems of the health centers so that they can obtain and access the information stored anywhere, protecting user data.
This will expand the benefits that new technologies bring. The way to manage data reliably, protected, available at any time and in the necessary format. They can be used as evidence for decision making, formulation, monitoring and evaluation of public policies, aimed at generating technological alternatives for the exercise of health.
To ensure the validity and operation of this strategy, the evaluation method called IS4H-MM will be implemented with the objective of measuring the maturity and progress of the system considering its organizational capacity related to governance, data management, digital transformation, innovation and knowledge management.
Its core concepts will result in the improvement of practices recognizing the data that is stored and integrating the necessary decisions to deploy each element of the Action Plan to strengthen Health Information Systems 2019-2023.