Fernando Núñez, National Director of Governance and Integration of Health Systems in the Ministry of Health, explained the interoperability strategy for the development of best practices in health systems thanks to the implementation of Snomed.
The Directorate of Governance and Integration of Health Systems, belongs to the Ministry of Health of the Argentine Nation, this agency is responsible for linking health projects of the different jurisdictions, provincial and municipal. A key aspect of governance.
Nunez entered his position as director in December 2019, when the new government began in Argentina. The previous administration had a project in advanced phases on a digital health strategy. These projects included the National Digital Health Network, which considers objectives related to governance and system integration, however, the main focus is interoperability in the software infrastructure.
It operates different rules, including syntactic interoperability, where we tell the system how that message has to be shaped, that resource for everything to interconnect and, on the other hand, there is semantic interoperability, which has to do with how things are named, and that it is done as standard."
To achieve this connection between different projects, the key is the use of Snomed (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine), a clinical terminology instrument used to introduce clinical information into standardized code-associated systems. “I would say it's the heart (Snomed), because it's the way different systems, different health actors can interoperate. So, in that sense this vocabulary is central to the strategy,” Núñez explained.
Núñez stated that Snomed's strategic implementation has begun in the National Administration of Medicines, Food and Medical Technology (ANMAT), whose registration system has begun to be transferred to Snomed.
The official highlighted the importance of such technologies during the pandemic, as they have been trained on the third Wednesday of each month, through the National Release Center (NRC), online, with the aim of knowing how to implement these systems in the health sector either public or private. To find out about Snomed in Argentina enter the following link: https://www.argentina.gob.ar/salud/snomed
