Floating & Smart Clinics, Digital Health in the Amazon: Insight into the Latin American Laboratory of the Future

Latin America is a fascinating and incredibly diverse region that extends almost to Antarctica in the south and to Mexico in the north. It spans many climate zones and the equator and includes islands in the Caribbean and the world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon. Many countries in the region are emerging economies. Highly fragmented healthcare systems and deep inequities in access to medical care are all too common.

The good news is that government authorities have been allocating public funds to successfully improve and increase access to care, including hard to reach, remote, areas. Startups are leveraging the potential of digitalization. And satellite technology is making the Internet – and with it, telemedicine – accessible even from the deepest reaches of the rainforest.

Primary care in an unconventional environment: The Amazon region includes eight countries in South America and covers an area of 7.5 million square kilometers (for reference, the total area of the U.S. is about 10 million squared kilometers). Many of its inhabitants live in small communities that are often inaccessible by road. The municipal health authorities of Borba, Brazil, came up with a solution: the Igara?u Fluvial Mobile Clinic, a floating hospital that delivers comprehensive primary care services. The floating clinic offers maternal and pediatric care as well as diagnosis and treatment for chronic diseases. The barge brings professional healthcare personnel to the region at regular intervals, which addresses the problem of the lack of continuity of care. The implementation of this program increased the number of people receiving primary care by more than 10 percent.

In Peru’s rainforest, it can often take three days to travel by boat to remote communities. There are no streets and no telephone lines. The TUCAN3G project brought mobile Internet access to six isolated communities using satellite and cell towers, establishing a connection to the hospital in Iquitos in northern Peru for telemedicine services.

Digital access – like access to healthcare itself – varies widely: Greater broadband access and mobile connectivity are cornerstones of development in the region, supporting distance learning, digital cash transfers, telemedicine, and online public services. In some countries, particularly in Central America and the Andes, lack of infrastructure and the high cost of service mean that large swaths of the population are excluded from the digital transformation. The situation is better in countries like Brazil, Costa Rica, and Mexico. Only four out of 10 people living in rural Latin America have broadband connectivity options compared with 71 percent of city-dwellers. Many assistance programs that could have an impact on individuals’ health are only accessible online, while the cost of equipping a person to use the Internet is substantially lower than the cost of treating health conditions.

Two examples: In Jamaica, the government launched a telemedicine pilot project in which specialists from the University Hospital of the West Indies support other less specialized doctors across the country. In Brazil, Flavia Deutsch founded a startup called Theia, whose platform supports women from the moment they find out they’re pregnant all the way to childbirth and postpartum. The platform provides curated content, offers access to vetted healthcare professionals through remote and in-person consultations, and creates community connections to create a modern support network.

Geared toward going digital: The Argentine startup Omnia Salud is also driving digital access to care. The integrated platform for invoicing, scheduling, telemedicine, and patient record-keeping solutions is geared toward Latin American healthcare providers who still rely primarily on a paper-based system but would like to go digital. The solution includes a patient portal and an integrated telemedicine application. This helps doctors adapt to the limitations created by COVID-19 and communicate with patients in a new way.

We too are supporting healthcare systems in Latin America and have established long-term relationships with local healthcare providers for this purpose. In Mar de Plata, a coastal city south of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Siemens Healthineers equipped the Centro de Especialidades Medical Ambulatorias with in-vitro and in-vivo technology. The center is now considered a model for public healthcare. In Chile, we partnered with Andes Salud to offer a state-of-the-art telemedicine service for patients in the clinic’s network. Our years-long collaboration with DASA (Diagnosticos da America), Latin America’s largest laboratory diagnostics provider, is another example: We support researchers like Cleide Sabino, a DASA endocrinologist, who’s made important findings on the effects of overprescribing Vitamin D.

I am excited to see women like Cleide Sabino and Flavia Deutsch leading the way in advancing technical solutions to improve care delivery. Promoting research and development in healthcare can have a tremendous impact on a nation’s population.

Help for the helpers: There are excellent examples of how progress can be made with political will and decisive action. What’s been happening in Colombia is truly inspiring. Some 95 percent of Colombians now have some kind of health insurance, and their life expectancy rose to 77.2 years in 2019 from 57.9 years in 1961. Our joint Smart Clinic project with the Colombian government and the Colombian Red Cross demonstrates the positive impact that a mobile care system can have for everyone. This endeavor started with a donation of $300,000 from Siemens, Siemens Foundation and Siemens Healthineers. We provided the technology and the Colombian Red Cross manages the mobile clinic in a bus that travels throughout the country. The traveling team of doctors and nurses provide medical care in places with major needs for maternal and child care. For example, only half of the Venezuelan women living in Colombia typically receive obstetric care during their pregnancy. In late December the smart clinic visited the remote coastal region of Rioacha in northern Colombia, not far from the Venezuelan border. It provided healthcare to the indigenous community and to the numerous migrants from Venezuela living in the area.

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In every destination, there is always something new to learn. It's motivating to discover and see how, despite all differences, the drive to provide better care to people around the world unites us. We need to continue to support communities with technology and to build up capacity so that everyone can have access to the care they need. Everywhere.

This is the third stop on my journey through the world’s healthcare systems. This journey is far from over! I’m looking forward to more recommendations.