In March, the annual conference on Digital Health and health systems of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) was held, which included an event with Latin American leaders and decision makers.
The HIMSS22 global conference began on March 16, and also included the Latin America Summit HIMSS22, where experts, specialists, and public officials shared experiences on digital transformation in the health sector and new trends in Digital Health.
One of the main topics of the meeting was the pandemic as a driver of digital transformation in the health sector. For example, the massive adoption of telemedicine and electronic health records (EHR) and the like.
During the opening of the Latin America Summit HIMSS22, Dr. Fernando Ruiz Gómez, Minister of Health of Colombia, highlighted the importance of having equitable health systems that provide universal coverage. In this way, he explained that a comprehensive patient-centered system must necessarily be based on interoperability.
“Only to the extent that we can make progress in ensuring that the information reaches the institutions before the patient can we have a health system with the quality that our patients deserve. Today we do not have it, that is the challenge we have as a country in Colombia: limit the fragmentation of health services based on digital transformation,” he explained.
In this sense, he recognized that the challenges of Latin American countries are similar and despite the fact that the health systems of each country have their own processes, this does not mean that they cannot work together.
On the other hand, Analía Baum, head of the General Directorate of Health Information Systems of the City of Buenos Aires, presented the experiences of her management in terms of digital transformation during the pandemic.
As Baum explained, the CBA began its digital transformation process in 2016, starting at the first level of care. In such a way that when the pandemic arrived, the city had various channels of communication and attention, such as the service through WhatsApp implemented two years earlier.
Likewise, during the pandemic it was necessary to deploy other tools such as remote consultation, digital prescription, chatbots with health information and other tools for remote monitoring such as questionnaires on self-reported symptoms, among others.
In this way, Baum highlighted the work of the initiatives and projects presented during the conference. And he considered that the region is in a great moment of digital maturity and open to collaboration.
The Latin America Summit conference included other professionals from the public and private sectors, for example, Araly Palacios from Amazon Web Services, Silvia Heringer, from the Albert Einstein Hospital in Brazil, or Víctor Castillo, president of the Colombian Cardiovascular Foundation, among others. .
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