Digital Frontiers

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Caring for the Sick

Experience in security technology has provided the basis for many companies to expand into the growing health-care sector. Spain has universal health care, decentralized among its 17 regions. National identity cards are expected to facilitate the system’s transfer to electronic records, and security is key in managing electronic health records.

But security is only one potential application for information technology companies in the health-care sector. A number of Spain’s most prominent IT companies saw the burgeoning of computerized and online health-care management as a business opportunity.

Telvent, which specializes in information technology and services around the world, began branching into health care services five years ago. The original products included IT developed for health care, such as customer information systems; those systems have been applied to managing centralized health records of millions of people in Spain and in the Dominican Republic and are now being introduced in Chile, Peru, and Brazil.

Telvent saw an opportunity to apply its experience in digital imaging to health-care specialization as well. The digital-imaging technology was originally developed for national identification cards in order to recognize patterns in documents and photographs and to screen noncitizens.

“For radiology, it’s more or less the same. You have to work with graphic libraries in order to recognize certain patterns, such as diseases,” says Adolfo Borrero, Telvent’s health-care and public administration vice president. This imaging technology is in use in the Dominican Republic for telemedicine. Looking to the future, company engineers are developing three-dimensional software that will build an image from thin photo slices of a patient’s body; the 3-D image will assist surgeons in planning operations.

Indra, another major Spanish IT company, has capitalized on its experience in managing transportation and traffic control to develop a health-care product that integrates all the information for a given patient within the health-care system.

The newest system also includes information on a patient’s social and occupational life. “It’s a complete health record, not just a clinical record,” says José Cubelos, Indra’s health sector director.

“Health-care expenses are growing, we have an older population, there’s an increase in lifestyle diseases such as diabetes,” says Cubelos. “The challenge here is to be able to connect and put in place the different processes for the providers of health-care services and the patient.” Healthcare 2.0, as Indra refers to its product, was developed following the company’s experience implementing regional health-care systems for more than 18 million Spaniards. Indra is now delivering regional and countrywide health-care IT, including systems for hospitals and primary care, in Portugal’s Azores Islands and in a Brazilian state of Acre; and the company is competing to deploy its system in Middle Eastern countries.

With previous expertise in creating simulations for flight training, Indra is now developing simulators for medicine, which can be customized for different specialties. Both Telvent and Indra are developing systems of intelligent devices in homes that will monitor the health of patients and facilitate doctor-patient communication.

Informática El Corte Inglés (IECISA), the information and communication technology subsidiary of the well-known Spanish department store, has also risen to a place of prominence in the development of information systems that serve as the backbone of health-care management. IECISA has developed national health-care IT projects that allow clients to efficiently manage health-care needs, primarily in purchasing and patient management. ”Free public health in Spain involves many resources and a great deal of funds, and technology is a crucial part of it,” says Miguel Angel Montero, director of health strategy for IECISA. IECISA operates in many countries in South America and the European Union.

The idea for another new company struck Beatriz Ortiz and her husband Carlos Herreros upon the birth of their first child, Eva, twelve years ago. “My husband saw how they placed the identification tag on her ankle before taking her off to care for her fever, and he thought how easy it would be to change the tag,” says Ortiz.

The company, Neonatal Custody and Identification (Identificación y Custodia Neonatal, or ICN) has created the first computerized neonatal identification system, a codifier with physical pieces that contain a unique identifying number for each new birth.

ICN has also developed a second layer of security to prevent baby thefts in response to customer requests from the United Arab Emirates and Dubai. All its ID now come fitted with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. A baby removed from the hospital will cause an alarm to sound.

Yet a third level of security involves a method for recording neonatal fingerprints that ICN was the first in the world to develop. (The usual ink fingerprints are not detailed enough to use for newborns). In the delivery room, the attendant opens a computer file, reads the mother’s codifier, and takes a photo of the mother’s fingerprint. The baby’s codifier is entered, and if it matches the mom’s, a special camera opens to take photos of the baby’s middle and index fingertips. The file is automatically closed and sent wirelessly to a control system.

Ortiz says it’s a challenge to keep up with the demands of a new and rapidly growing company, but “it’s more than a business for us. We’re pushed by the thought that we’re doing something necessary and important, which gives us a lot of joy.”

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