By E-Health Reporter Latin America
Paul Bonnet has a degree in Business Management and Administration and is currently the Director General of Vademecum International, a leading pharmacological information company.
In an exclusive conversation with E-Health Reporter Latin America, he identifies the progress that should be made in providing support for clinical decision making, presents the philosophy behind the multinational’s projects and emphasizes the role of IT services in improving healthcare.
The integration of pharmacological information is one of the main challenges in Latin America. What action are you taking to meet it?
Firstly, we work exclusively in the administration and maintenance of medication information. We also focus on clinical practice. The language and location of this data provides us with added value as no other Spanish speaking company has invested significantly in providing structured information that can be integrated with IT systems in Spanish, and which is also indexed with the local Vademecum in each country.
Do you think that legislation could help to reduce medication errors?
Of course. Any regulations linked to medication management would be an incentive for healthcare service providers to get informatized and start to use structured pharmacological databases. As our database uses interoperable international standards, we can connect with national codes. The promotion of the standardization of processes related to medications, which is called for by different institutions in the region, is undoubtedly an important step. However, we need to make the desired official regulations a reality and put them into practice.
And is Latin America prepared to achieve this?
Yes, I think that apart from the official aspect, it is a human challenge. My view is that the technology exists as all technology providers know how to integrate data, the interconnecting layer exists, the knowledge exists, but the human effort is lacking. Latin America needs political that will work with managers, decision makers, technological partners and leaders to make it happen.
In that regard, what is the importance of IT processes?
IT processes change the way we work, providing endless benefits as long as the actors involved are not just simple consumers of technologies but actively promote the advantages that have been identified and those still to be discovered.
Vademecum International has a presence in strategic locations in the region, what have you found has been the impact of ICTs on e-Health?
What we are seeing is an improvement in healthcare. Each region, together with its technological partners, has in recent years been going through a learning process in which both successes and failures are assessed and this makes them more aware of the opportunities they wish to prioritize in e-Health. Now it is important to encourage the relationship between pre-inscription and patients’ Electronic Health Records. We have to think about where we are going with the informatization of health records: organizations need to provide security guarantees to protect information.
During ExpoHospital 2013, in Chile, you spoke about the philosophy of some of the company’s projects…
Yes, all the projects share the same idea: improving costs and optimizing management. We went to Chile with the objective of telling the sector that there is a solution in which information systems can draw on a database of pharmacological knowledge that is up to date, standardized and interoperable. We also went to show decision makers how our integrated solutions have been implemented in Primary Care IT systems (such as those at the Dr. José Eduardo Ahues Salame Health Center and the San Felipe APS Center – in both cases the integration of the pharmacological database was carried out with the provider Saydex and their RAYEN software) and in hospital IT systems (such as that of the Clínica Alemana).
How far do you think we should go in providing support for clinical decision-making?
Although the databases are established and in Latin America there is already an awareness of the benefits that ICTs can provide for e-Health, to make the desire for an informatized health system a reality we need regulations and decision-makers who strongly support the products that ensure better quality process management and greater patient and clinical safety. We also need clinical professionals who are aware of the benefits of these new technologies and who are willing to encourage their colleagues to use them. It is important to connect the electronic health record to pharmacological prescription; it is the only way to achieve greater safety for both the patient and the clinic.
