Digitalising the health sector would support the creation of effective public policies

• A digital health expert explains that the health sector’s problems need technology to drive comprehensive solutions.

Santo Domingo. – One of the major goals of digitalisation is to generate data to drive public policy, as it would make it possible to identify health problems in the population more accurately.

Fedor Vidal, who served as head of IT for the international division of Johns Hopkins Medicine International, explains that technology together with e-health can directly help solve the problems and challenges facing the country.

Referring to the current situation with medical records, for example, he noted that most are still kept manually, showing that the use of information technology is necessary if we want to face the future.

The health business and technology specialist cited the need for structured information, such as that generated by an electronic record, to determine communities’ needs. “It is impossible to measure a country’s population when it is on paper, because accurate quantitative analysis cannot be carried out,” stressed the CEO of Arium Salud Digital.

He added that the country has a health model and social security system with identified challenges, so it must now make the leap from a curative model to a preventive one, in which technology and primary care play a fundamental role.

Digitalisation, which means cost savings for both patients and the health system, would avoid the unnecessary repetition of tests or lab work. Likewise, if a patient had to travel from one place to another just to deliver a result, they could connect with their doctor digitally.

It saves lives. Human errors, such as prescribing new medication without knowing the patient’s treatment plan, can cause a harmful drug interaction and, in the worst cases, even death; digitalisation would prevent this.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 2.6 million patients die every year as a result of unexpected errors, which cost at least US$42 billion a year.

“The problems of the health sector need technology to drive solutions,” said Vidal.

---

Arium Salud Digital

A company that provides digital services and tools to transform how existing processes are managed in the health sector through interconnected systems, while facilitating interaction between the different players in the market and providing technological solutions for their effectiveness. Arium Salud Digital’s mission is to provide a digital health ecosystem that interconnects all the key players in the sector, with the aim of improving people’s quality of life through efficient and secure solutions based on state-of-the-art technology.

Find out more about AF Comunicación Estratégica and its clients