Mobile solutions for healthcare delivery in Argentina

P.P. ESCOBAR; M. SANTIAGO; M. DEL FRESNO; J.M. MASSA

Global Telemedicine and e-Health Updates: Knowledge Resources

LuxExpo

Lugar: Luxemburgo; Año: 2009 vol. 2 p. 454 - 457

1998-5509

In Argentina, health institutions face the serious problem ofan always increasing demand of services, without real possibilities toextend neither their infrastructure nor the human resources to adapt tothese needs. This leads to the collapse of the hospital services,increasing costs for institution and reducing the healthcare quality.The high penetration of Internet and mobile technologies in the countryhave allowed us to implement telemedicine applications based onSMS/MMS, with low cost and a huge social impact. Combining webbasedapplications and GPS/GPRS devices, a home care control systemwas implemented, for patients with chronic diseases like diabetes,hypertension, coronary and respiratory pathologies and others. Inaddition an appointment management system was implemented.First results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the solutions; bothspecialists and patients are satisfied with them. By now we are addingnew features such as intelligent monitoring, advanced signalsprocessing for automatic pathologies recognition using neural networksand rule-based expert systems to aid in the decision making. Also dataencryption; compression and GPS features will be added.These efforts intend to shorten the technological gap with advancedcountries, trying to reach the future of the medical attentionincorporating concepts of ambience intelligence and health domotics.