Photo: Marcos Garcia, Vicepresident and General Manager for Spain and Latin America and Miriam Poves, Marketing Manager at Cerner Iberia and Latin America.

EHealth Reporter Latin America: What new products are Cerner presenting at Hospitalar and what are your projections for Latin America?

Marcos García: We want to contribute to improved administration of hospitals and healthcare in general with Cerner’s tools and solutions.

The company is American but has a major presence in Europe and Asia. Most of Cerner’s employees are located outside the United States. In Latin America, although we have a small number of clients at the moment, we can see that there is very great interest in our technology.

By E-Health Reporter Latin America at HIMSS 13

Gonzalo Grebe is the General Manager of the Las Condes Clinic, the first hospital in the region to be certified by HIMMS, the American organization that evaluates the level of development of information technology projects in healthcare. Speaking to E-Health Reporter Latin America together with Helen Sotomayor, the Information Technology Manager, and René Canave,Deputy Manager of Systems, he described how the Chilean institution is focusing on e-health to position itself as an example for Latin American medicine.

E-HEALTH REPORTER LATIN AMERICA: Could you describe the process implemented to computerize the medical departments at the Las Conde Clinic? 

Helen Sotomayor: We started out by developing a plan to improve the information services we were delivering our clinics. To do this, we asked about the problems that the doctors were having, the challenges in patient treatment that came with the growth of our clinic and the availability of information at all times. In response to these questions we set out 3 pillars for our project: to make information available, to make it secure and to connect the different systems.

By Daniela Chueke

Andrea Cortinois is a Professor at the University of Toronto, where he teaches International Healthcare and Immigration and Healthcare. He is also part of the Center for Global E-Health Innovation, founded by the Colombian e-health expert Doctor Alejandro Jadad. Cortinois shares his colleague’s interest in what is going in Latin America, a region he is familiar with: he spent six years in Bolivia and worked in many other countries in the region as an expert in international health. On his first visit to Argentina in August 2012, invited by the Panamerican Health Organization to share his experiences working in e-health and equality, present his eSAC project and participate in a debate with local experts on possible ways to implement a national e-health plan, he was interviewed by E-Health Reporter Latin America.

 

EHealth Reporter Latin America: What can you share from the Canadian experience with regard to the development of e-Health?

By Daniela Chueke

The Engineer Mariano Soratti is the head of the Sistema Integrado de Información Sanitaria Argentino (Argentinian Integrated Healthcare Information System, SISA) being developed by the National Health Ministry, Argentina. We interviewed him to find out how such an ambitious project is put together, bearing in mind that Argentina is a federal country in which each province has an autonomous government and its own regulations regarding healthcare.

 

EHealth Reporter Latin America: What must a developer take into account when planning a new clinical system so that, once implemented, it can interact with SISA?  

By Daniela Chueke

Carlos Cendra studied economic and business sciences and started work at a technology consultancy in Spain, where he was involved in a consultancy project helping to redefine Telefónica’s entire commercial strategy. He went on to work on a technological renovation project in hospitals that led him to renew the entire technological portfolio at 82 Spanish hospitals. In 1997 he decided to dedicate himself exclusively to consultancy in the healthcare field and continued to do so for the next 14 years. In 2007, as part of a healthcare consultancy team, he joined up with Telefónica again as an external consultant and after four years took part in the eHealth Telefónica project, ending up joining the Company.  

 “My history with Telefónica goes back a long way. I have a wide-ranging vision of healthcare with regards to technology, strategic technological planning, implementation of electronic health records, hospital computerization and telemedicine projects,” says Cendra, explaining that although he did much of his work in Spain, he was always involved in Latin America.

We wanted to find out a little more

By Daniela Chueke

The Hospital Italiano offers a course specializing in Health IT as part of its HIBA residency program through its University Institute.

The course trains recently graduated doctors in supporting the work of other doctors. It includes tools from Healthcare Administration and Management Sciences as well as studies in new technologies such as computer and information sciences. Also, as the discipline is relatively new, it includes a space dedicated to research into the impact of its application for which reason it also involves the study of epidemiological issues.  

The training program is designed both for those who have just graduated and those who already have a specialty, the former studying for 4 years and the latter for 2 years.