Ruiz Escudero at the presentation of the 'Health Observatory': "Data is the key to the success of optimal healthcare management".
The Regional Minister of Health made these statements during the presentation of this tool, developed by the Círculo de la Sanidad, which offers more than 200 different indicators on the state of the National Health System (SNS).
The presentation, which could be followed via streaming, took place this Thursday in the auditorium of the ONCE Foundation headquarters and was also attended by the Deputy Director General of Health Information and Innovation of the Ministry of Health, Mercedes Alfaro Latorre.
Madrid, May 27, 2021 - The Regional Minister of Health of the Community of Madrid, Enrique Ruiz Escudero, said on Thursday that "data is the key to the success or failure of a health strategy because, if a healthcare manager has reliable data, he or she has a long way to go to achieve optimal management, which will also be enhanced by a good interpretation of this information"
Ruiz Escudero made these statements during the closing ceremony of the presentation of the digital tool 'Health Observatory', created by the Círculo de la Sanidad and which makes available to the population and the competent authorities in the field, more than 200 indicators that facilitate access to information on the NHS and decision-making on its evolution.
The Regional Minister of Health has insisted on the importance of the digitalization of healthcare processes and has given as an example the situation in the Community of Madrid in which "the sum of having good data and continuous innovation have been key to provide a rapid and decisive healthcare response during the pandemic. He also thanked the Círculo de la Sanidad for the creation of this tool which "represents another step forward in the digital transformation of our healthcare systems".
The Deputy Director General of Health Information and Innovation at the Ministry of Health, Mercedes Alfaro Latorre, also spoke along these lines, recalling the complexity of the data treatment processes and thanking initiatives such as the 'Health Observatory', which, in her opinion "reinforce the need to continue working on the collection and analysis of data by the different administrations and agents that form part of this complex process. "Information systems are useful only if they are used. Only when their failures are discovered and reported do we have the opportunity to solve them and improve to provide a complete picture of the situation," he said.
For his part, the President of the Círculo de la Sanidad, Ángel Puente, who opened the event, highlighted the need to organize "the large number of data and the large amount of information available" in order to contribute to improving the SNS from all the agents involved in its functioning and progress.
Thus, Puente stressed the importance of making the available data dynamic in order to make the information useful and allow those responsible for management to make the right decisions. "Aware of the importance of immediacy and faithful to our vocation of service to healthcare, at the Circle we set to work on this tool to be at the forefront of digital healthcare and to be able to offer not only data, but also comparisons of the more than 200 variables that we will analyze periodically to be able to offer our recommendations for the future of the sector," he said.
In this sense, the director of the Health and Social Healthcare Sector of ILUNION, Eusebio Azorín, who has led the event, has put the accent on the pandemic, stressing the importance of the data being of a different nature and allowing us to analyze everything that has happened and what lies ahead in the field of healthcare after the passage of the healthcare crisis, "because if at our last meeting we set as great challenges for the future to combat the progressive aging of the progression and the differences between autonomous communities, now the urgent thing is to address the aspects aggravated by the COVID-19".
For his part, the president of AZIERTA, Ángel Navarro, referred to the different variables that contribute to the service of society, which is, in his opinion, the ultimate purpose of data and its treatment. Thus, Navarro highlighted big data, which must be sustainable, reliable and accessible to everyone; public-private collaboration, which has been ratified more than ever with the recent development of vaccines; and the concept of 'science to business', since, by saving health, the economy is saved.
"Science has to have an impact on the real lives of citizens, and to do so it has to be commercialized; we must follow the 'science to business' model so that the results of science reach their ultimate goal, which is people," he said.
A NOVEL TOOL
The specialist in strategic healthcare consultancy, Luis Rosado, was in charge of explaining how the 'Health Observatory' works and the different functionalities offered by the tool. "The data are there as something static everywhere, but what is really important is to be able to extract and analyze them, because if we are not able to process them and give them meaning, they are of no use to us," said Rosado, who emphasized the continuous monitoring and updating of these data "to find out how the SNS is doing".
Thus, among the information that will be included in this tool, Rosado explained that it will be possible to find both process indicators and indicators of the functioning of the system and of results. Specifically, users will have access to data on the accessibility of the SNS, its quality indicators, figures on healthcare spending, morbidity and mortality, as well as European data on the state of healthcare in other countries, among many others.
"The tool also provides an important element of security, which is the analysis of the data that will be carried out on an ongoing basis and to which data will be added periodically. Specifically, by the end of June we will have the first data on the analysis of the effect of the pandemic on the NHS," he concluded.
About the Círculo de la Sanidad
The Círculo de la Sanidad is a non-profit association made up of 20 executives from the main companies that provide goods and services to the National Health System and whose aim is to create spaces for collaboration between all the agents that operate in the healthcare system in order to generate knowledge that will enable progress to be made in improving healthcare in Spain.