On Tuesday, June 30, the fifth Forum on Health Information Technologies (Forum IT Salud 2015), organized by the Asociación Argentina de Usuarios de la Informática y las Comunicaciones (Usuaria) was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Although the focus of the conference was medical informatics, this year other issues were also addressed such as innovation, cyber-security and interoperability. The opening presentation was given by Juan José Dell’Acqua, Executive Director of Usuaria, and Eduardo del Piano, President of the Academic Committee of the Forum, who invited the public to join Proyecto Mais.
The next person to speak was Gustavo Aguirre, aeronautical engineer and VP of Innovation and Cognitive Computers at Globant. During his presentation, he spoke about the process that a company must go through to be innovative. “The key is to achieve organic, cultural innovation with the ability to adapt quickly,” he said.
Aguirre noted that according to current market trends, innovators are not great leaders of industry, but instead described them more as “outsiders”. He recommended that businesses decide upon the position they want to occupy in their field: innovators, designers of experiences, or followers of others. “When people talk about innovation, they mean business, not technology,” he argued.
The engineer Gustavo Brey, manager of Technological Infrastructure and Communications at PAMI, presented the Interactive Information System (SII) developed by the healthcare provider, which today is the largest in Latin America.
He described it as a single database with a million transactions per day, organized into 25 internal subsystems. The functions of the SII include Statistical Control of Facilities (CEP) which digitalizes the process of medical audits. Since it was implemented in an effort to detect fraud, providers must enter the actions they carry out so that auditing doctors can make the proper assessment. “It’s a systematized online circuit that makes the procedures more flexible,” said the engineer.
Furthermore, Brey introduced “Tu historia, tu derecho (Your history, your right)” a web page in which members of PAMI can find their full electronic health record. Finally, the engineer explained that the program seeks to democratize adults’ information.
The final speaker in the first section of the event was Silvia Carranza, President of the Centro de Inclusión Libre y Solidario de Argentina (Argentina Center of Free Inclusion and Solidarity, CILSA), invited by Microsoft Argentina. Accompanied by Daniela Vallejos, a colleague at the NGO, Carranza emphasized that technology can be a means of social inclusion. “Technological tools help people with disabilities in a clear example of bio-mechanics,” he said.
They also presented the Youth Park program in which people with disabilities are trained in informatics tools such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and others, so they can join the labor market. “The objective of CILSA is to make sure that people are seen for their abilities, not their disabilities,” said the president of the organization.
After a breakfast, the conference continued at a good pace. The president of HL7 Argentina, Diego Kaminker, presented the Argentine Framework for Health Interoperability (MAIS) project. The goal of the program is to instill the concept of interoperable healthcare in Argentina, allowing the exchange of electronic documents between healthcare institutions with different systems, ensuring that patients will have access to their electronic health record anywhere in the country.
He also revealed that the design includes an initial list of selected documents that are incorporated into the interoperability platform: surgical protocols, medical symptoms, nursing sheet, pathological anatomy report and laboratory report, among others.
The international dimension of the Forum became apparent in the conference room when the Brazilian José Luis Bruzadín, Latin American director of the Healthcare and Life Sciences Group at Intel, took the stage. His speech was about the multinational company’s vision of how healthcare can be improved between 2020 and 2030 by informatics innovations.
The main aspects were mHealth and telemedicine: “Patients will be empowered and this will reduce the number of consults and hospital admittances,” he predicted. Bruzadín also emphasized the importance of continuing to work on the partnership between medicine and the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT): “In the future, all medical devices and apparatus will be able to be controlled via the internet. Nurses will be able to administer medications from their tablet, for example,” he said.
Close to midday the talk “Problems and solutions in cyber-security for Healthcare companies,” was held, led by Fernando Calo, Head of Products at Telefónica, and Claudio Caracciollo, Chief Security Ambassador at Eleven Paths.
During their presentation, the cybernetic security experts demonstrated to the audience the ways in which it is possible to violate informatics systems and steal relevant information. In addition, they presented real cases from around the world in which the medical devices, in hospitals and on wearables, were altered. “We might all have vulnerabilities in our development, but the important thing is to stay alert so we can correct them,” said Caló.
The person entrusted with closing the conference was Doctor Daniel Luna, CIO of the Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, a regular speaker at the Forum IT Salud. Luna recommended two authors: Nicholas Negroponte, a visionary from the 90s, and Eric Topor, the first to dare to say that the human being can be digitalized.
Providing more information about the architect’s concepts, Luna mentioned the TED talk that Negroponte gave last year and cited the book Being Digital, published in 1995. Then he referred to two books by Topol: The Creative Destruction of Medicine, which addresses how ICTs have changed the healthcare process, and The Patient Will See You Know, in which he discusses democratization of medicine.
Discussing the latter book, the doctor said: “We always talk about empowering the patient… it shouldn’t be like that, the patient should empower us and put an end to medical paternalism.”
Luna also mentioned developments in genome technology and said that the science promises to provide personalized medicine through the digitalization of DNA. “Very soon, the digitalization of molecular biology of the human being will become an every day thing,” he concluded.
