Afraid of flying?

Quality health care is effective, safe, and person-centric. This means services are timely (without long wait times or harmful delays); equitable (regardless of gender, ethnicity, geographic location, and socioeconomic status); integrated (offering the full range of services a person needs throughout their lifetime); and efficient (maximizing the benefit of available resources and avoiding waste).¹

Poor quality medical care, on the other hand, means incorrect diagnoses, improper or unnecessary treatments, medication errors, lack of screening and preventative actions, unsafe clinical facilities, and providers without proper training. Every year, between 5.7 and 8.4 million deaths are attributed to poorquality care in low and medium income countries, or up to 15% of deaths in those countries.²

To put in another way, the risk of dying due to medical error during a hospital stay (1 in 300 people, according to the WHO) vastly outweighs the risk of dying in a plane crash (1 in 3 million people).³ And although no country is immune to this problem (some estimates claim that if medical error were included in the official ranking, it would be the third leading cause of death in the US),⁴,⁵ lower income countries—which are home to 80% of the world’s population—have the highest rates of death due to “adverse events.”⁶ In LAC, only 30% of preventable deaths are caused by lack of access to medical attention. The other 70% are the result of poor quality.⁷

Also part of healthcare quality is preventing diseases through early detection and guidance, as well as education to promote behavioral changes both within and outside of clinics. A closer look at the probability of dying from a non-communicable disease would likely recalibrate some people’s fear of flying. In the US, 1 in 6 people die of heart disease, and 1 in 7 of cancer⁸ In 2019 alone, it was estimated that 2.5 million deaths in the Americas—35% of all deaths—were preventable.⁹ In terms of data, current initiatives to measure quality are fragmented and focus more on inputs than outputs. They are not designed based on the population’s health needs.¹⁰ Since decision-makers in the region do not have timely information that provides a snapshot of the health system as a whole, they are flying blind.

The value of DT

The first response to this situation is usually: How and in what areas can DT help? Before answering this question, we need to first consider a more important one: Who does this process benefit? The answer is not just citizens, but also professionals and providers, institutions, and the health system in general. This is what makes DT such an integral part of reaching the “Quintuple Aim” of health care: i) improving the patient experience; ii) improving the population’s health; iii) reducing costs; iv) improving the work life of medical providers and professionals; and v)promoting equity and inclusion.¹¹ The DT helps this ecosystem of stakeholders by giving them timely access to precise information.

Beneficios digitales en concreto

The network of DT solutions is vast and will only be effective with a strategy tailored to each country’s needs and resources.
Also, there is mixed evidence on ineffective implementations and uses of IT tools in specific contexts.

The examples and information below are specific cases where introducing technology has facilitated progress toward quality.