About two million people die each year from chronic diseases, infections and cancer, that is, conditions that are largely preventable, according to the IDC Health Insights LATAM Report carried out in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Panama.
“At least with early detection, the impact can be minimized and in some cases a cure can be achieved,” said Alonso Verdugo Medina, leader of the health industry, CMO, Microsoft Latin America during his participation in the III Smart Health Leaders Summit Mexico 2022.
He mentioned that the challenges to work on focus on epidemiology, regardless of what is happening in Latin America and with a focus on the incidence where 1,630 million new cases per year, distributed mainly in infectious diseases, neurological and psychiatric diseases.
“Although cancer is one of the diseases with the greatest financial impact, the percentage is lower, the other diseases that hit health budgets hard are chronic degenerative diseases that can reach between 60 and 70% of the total health budget of a system, being able to attend to and manage these illnesses well is a priority,” said Alonso Verdugo.
The specialist explained that the prevalence rate is 407 million cases, “the pandemic has put on the table that neurological and psychiatric diseases, together with chronic issues, have an impact on health and will affect quality of life issues, longevity and in terms of productivity of a nation, not to mention the direct impacts on a personal and family level, which are enormous”.
health technology
In 2021, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) established eight guiding principles of health: universal connectivity, digital goods, digital health, interoperability, human rights, artificial intelligence, information security and public health architecture.
mentioned that they require digital health goods such as: applications, access to data, anonymized open health in order to improve conditions and traceability, and offer patient monitoring to reduce the digital education gap, be more inclusive and support the most vulnerable in the first instance.
The correct use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can avoid bias, inadequate qualifications, “at Microsoft we have an ethics committee to help companies in projects using AI that can impact a community.”
He said that the projects must be developed under three aspects: better experiences and perspectives and better attention. Better experiences focused on: personalized care to avoid catastrophic events. Better prospects: via clinical and operational analysis and data interoperability.
Better care focused on collaboration and coordination with the team, continuous monitoring of the patient, via the Internet of Things and analysis to optimize treatments.
“Create new systems of health participation by connecting data from multiple registration systems and thereby provide new pathways for care,” he concluded.