This health information network is the first in the world to
offer country-wide coverage and to use the Linux operating system. Cubaweb.cu , the first Cuban website, was conceived and developed at INFOMED, and the first edition of the digital Granma International was achieved with its collaboration.
-BY LILLIAM RIERA (Granma International staff writer)
IN a room in an old mansion in Vedado, designed by architect Eugenio Rayneri, one of those involved in the construction of Havana's Capitol buiding, the telematic network of the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) was developed in 1992, the world's first to offer nationwide coverage and to use Linux as its operating system.
It was an extremely complex moment for the country. The MINSAP information system, like the rest of Cuba's socio-economic infrastructure, was suddenly confronted with serious difficulties. Socialism had fallen in Eastern Europe; the Soviet Union, Cuba's largest trade partner, was no longer in existence; and the U.S. blockade was intensifying.
The necessary cutback of more than $1 million USD for the National Medical Sciences Information Center, earmarked solely for the acquisition of magazines and other scientific publications, was the detonator.
"I believe we were successful because a crisis situation was confronted with a vision of the future," INFOMED director Pedro Urra told Granma International. It was the moment to take advantage of new information and communication technologies from an economic standpoint, in order to connect the most important health and research institutions, as well as those in the provinces, via electronic mail, thus providing access to significant national and international databases and other services like the Web, which were developed later.
"We created a product by mobilizing resources, it couldn't be any other way," Urra noted. In association with the Pan American Health Organization, INFOMED was the recipient of an extra-budgetary project from the United Nations Development Program, worth $300,000 USD. Subsequently the network was extended without dipping into the health budget, financed by consultancy projects and other services offered to certain enterprises.
The agency has also received systematic help from the U.S. non- governmental agency INFOMED USA. According to Urra, the computers brought on one of the Pastors for Peace caravans, "were acquired by them for our project."
The first task was to build a network that linked the biotechnology laboratories of all the country's medical faculties, and this, in turn, would lead the process of building another national health information system, based on the training in this field.
Personnel were trained, and nodes were mounted (points of access to a network) in all the provincial medical faculties, Urra related, in addition to developing a philosophy of "presence points" (which is nothing more than rescuing the public library system, where people lacking the means can go to share resources and access information).
>From the beginning, INFOMED used the operating system LINUX - currently causing a crisis at Microsoft - because it was highly adaptable to the particularities of the task and, "because it isn't something packaged," allows for creativity, as well as its work philosophy based on cooperation, states its director.
DEMAND BEYOND ITS POSSIBILITIES
Cuba, unlike the industrialized nations, doesn't possess a high density of computers and telephone lines per citizen, which has led to the current demand for this type of information being beyond INFOMED's capacity, taking into account
the huge human potential of the Cuban health system, distributed
throughout the entire country.
Systematic statistics indicate an average of more than 6000 connections daily in City of Havana alone, "a very high figure for any institution offering Internet services," Urra pointed out.
Training has been a constant task within the project, whose emblem is, "Learning constitutes the basis for good decision-making when problems arise." Every week, from September through July, courses are offered to health professionals. In addition, they familiarize children from a school in the vicinity with the facility's new technologies.
On April 23, 2001, Havana is to host the Regional Congress of Health Information Sciences, where INFOMED will present Cuba's Virtual Library (access to information through computer networks) and the Virtual Health University, connected to these technologies with the aim of continuing health professionals' education. "There's no other way to keep more than 65,000 doctors familiar with the cutting edge of medicine," Urra commented.
There they will also launch the Telemedicine Network, "adapted to our conditions, which is able to cover specialized consultations and to send basic X-rays," among other advantages.
In the INFOMED site (www.sld.cu) users can find the complete texts of all of Cuba's medical magazines, all bibliographical health databases, as well as a cultural site.
In the institution's headquarters a temporary gallery has been set up where works of Cuban painters will be systematically displayed (which are also on the Web), because the human and integral concept of health is not limited to sickness - "it's happiness, culture, living together; it's insertion in an appropriate environment."
As a curious piece of information, cubaweb.cu, Cuba's first Internet site, was conceived and implemented by INFOMED, as well as the first Internet edition of Granma International, placed in the network of networks on April 1, 1996, and which was developed in collaboration with the agency.
"All of this lies within our strategy of incubating projects," Urra stressed at the close of our conversation."
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