An Internal Audit study of the Costa Rican Social Security Fund (CCSS) revealed the need for the institution to improve and integrate the pathology services in a single computer system in the hospital centers.
According to the research, the CCSS has not formalized a formal document that standardizes the processes of pathological anatomy.
We are not sayin there are no attention protocols, just that there isn’t a single protocol for all pathology services,”
said Rafael Herrera, Head of Information and Communication Technologies of the Internal Audit.
One of the findings was that 67% of the information systems distributed in 11 pathology services of the CCSS have the risks of being technological obsolete in aspects such as: date of app installment in previous versions of the data bases management systems, date of the programming languages in which they were developed and the absence of technical documentation and user support.
It is time for the Fund to think of an integrated solution that contemplates these processes of pathological anatomy, thus eliminating the risks of technological invalidity. We are not talking about too many old systems, we are talking about systems created in the 1990s, in the 2000s but, we believe there are risks in the technological tools,”
said Herrera.
In addition, he said that the solutions do not conform to institutional guidelines on issues such as integration with institutional tools such as the Integrated Security Module (MISE) or applications of the project Digital Single Health Record and Hospital Digital Archive (EDUS-ARCA).
So far, there is no computer system in the institution that supports and automates the management of these services and that allows determining the path in the analytical processes for the evaluation of biopsy samples, cytology and autopsies.
According to Herrera, there are several local solutions to assist this process in an automated way. However, a system that works as a basic input is still necessary to keep track of issues related to the prevention and detection of cancer.