San Martín is the first department to implement Telemedicine services for the Intensive Cities Unit (ICU) in Peru.
The San Martín region in Peru recently inaugurated the first TeleUCI service nationwide thanks to an alliance with the Ministry of Health (Minsa) and the Ate Vitarte Emergency Hospital in Lima. This system will interconnect with various regions of the country.
ICUs are generally installed in third and fourth level hospitals. Therefore, first and second level hospitals do not specialize in intensive care, and through TeleUCI it is possible to communicate hospitals with ICUs with hospitals that do not have these tools and thus respond better to medical emergencies.
In addition, it is not only a question of medical infrastructure but also of the number of specialists, a doctor specialized in the ICU must undergo various training stages before practicing, so the TeleUCI units take advantage of medical specialists, especially in regions where they do not have with a large number of medical professionals.
Leslie Zevallos Quintero, head of the Regional Health Directorate (Diresa), recognized the progress that has been made in the last year in hospitals in the interior of the country. He also spoke of the importance of having a unique hospital network in Peru.
The department of San Martín began to gradually join the National TeleHealth Network in 2017, in the first instance, the Tarapoto hospital and the San José de Sisa rural hospital joined.