One of the pioneering centers in the application of information and communication technologies to improve medical care is the Hospital Italiano of Buenos Aires.
At the 8th HIBA Academic Congress on Healthcare Information Systems 2013, Doctor Luis Ritacco, the medical coordinator at the Planning and Virtual Navigation Unit at HIBA, gave a step by step explanation of how the pre-surgical virtual simulation section works. Similarly, Doctor Martin Waldhorn, from the Anesthesiology Service; the engineer Gustavo Bianco, from the Department of Software Engineering; and the engineer Marcelo Sabalza, from the Research and Innovation Department, described the changes that informatization has generated at the anesthesiology table.
Ritacco said that at the Planning and Virtual Navigation Unit surgical problems are solved with software and hardware.
“Currently, we use two dimensions to plan surgery, for example radiography and tomography. Being able to bring together all the images allows us to think in 3D”, he said.
He also said that pre-surgical simulation makes it possible to make progress toward new paradigms in studies. “The new aspect is the ability to create a three dimensional structure and navigate through it, this is a very useful solution in traumatology, for bone transplants, for example”, Ritacco concluded.
Waldhorn, meanwhile, focused on expanding the concept of AIMS: “This is an information management system for anesthesia. It is a comprehensive system that includes everything from the instructions to the anesthesiologist to billing and later analysis”.
As he went on to explain, the objective of informatizing the Anesthesiology table is to focus on patient safety, quality of care, service and hospital management and an improvement program for surgical care.
The comparison between paper and digital files is a classic one in the realms of e-Health. Bianco showed participants a surgical anesthesiology file and said: “The electronic file includes medical, legal, statistical, research, billing and educational advances”.
Sabalza chose to speak about the reach of informatization in anesthesiology and noted some achievements: frequency, the extent of the user-focused design, the functioning of a hybrid solution and patient satisfaction.
Finally, Sabalza concluded: “The idea is for the anesthesiologist to be able to do their job in a few clicks”.
