The importance of Information Technology in Health
2 minutes read
One of the points Fedor Vidal highlights is the great difficulty the public sector faces in investing in this field.
Santo Domingo. – One of the main challenges facing doctors today is developing skills in the use of Health Information Technology, which offers great potential for achieving a greater impact on the development of the field and on social wellbeing.
On this subject, Fedor Vidal, CEO of Arium Salud Digital, highlights one important aspect: understanding what digital transformation in health really involves. He notes that most Latin American countries show interest, but usually with a mistaken understanding. Seeing the implementation of electronic health records as a technology purchase is where the mistake begins.
He mentions several reasons for the low willingness to invest in Health Information Technology: the difficult economic reality of the post-pandemic world; the sector’s culture, in which “the urgent prevents doing the important” and hospitals are still seen as care providers rather than as “social enterprises that produce services”; and practices in which the main motivation is the ups and downs of politics.
According to the 1st Study on the State of Digital Health in the Dominican Republic, carried out by Arium Salud Digital, 68.4% report budget constraints that prevent them from making the necessary investments, whether at institutional or sector level, while the remaining 31.6% say they have or have had access to the funding required for certain initiatives.
“In the private sector the picture is more encouraging, since most of the results, 71.1%, point to a willingness to make these investments, with 29.9% the exception. As one would expect, the availability of resources for these investments is not a problem for most of those interviewed either,” says Vidal.
Among the strengths of the country’s digital health transformation, it is important to add that interest in investing in information technology is growing, according to several of those interviewed. Traditionally, health technology investments tend to go into medical technology, which is used to provide diagnostic and therapeutic services and guarantees a certain economic return.
In conclusion, Health Information Technology is growing at a dizzying pace every day, with a major impact on the field and on medical education. Professionals must be prepared to take on this challenge, a task that should begin as soon as they enter medical school, which is why activities and teaching related to the use of ICT are already included in medical school curricula.
Arium Salud Digital
A company that provides digital services and tools to transform the management of existing processes in the health sector through interconnected systems, facilitating interaction between market players and providing technology solutions for their effectiveness. Arium Salud Digital’s mission is to provide a digital health ecosystem that connects all the key players in the sector, with the aim of improving the population’s quality of life through efficient and secure solutions based on state-of-the-art technology.