The Consolidation of the Digital Health Ecosystem

When tallying my columns on this medium, it's easy to spot a trend. Each one mentions the importance of collaboration between companies, and how that element can be a differentiator in the market. I accept that it is dramatically easier to talk about and analyze the benefits of collaboration than to genuinely generate actions that trigger effective and lasting relationships of value creation in the Mexican and Latin American markets.

Well, we stopped talking about collaboration, and we started to act. After a year of laying the foundations for a genuine cooperation of health information technology companies in August 2023, we launched the Digital Health Ecosystem project for market consideration, with the main objective of consolidating the individual capabilities of dozens of technology companies in favor of digitizing health models and maximizing opportunities for them. I am pleased to announce that more than 50 companies have partnered to execute joint digital transformation projects.

It was not an easy decision to make. During the last five years, I have observed a considerable number of initiatives that after a few months lose traction and become an observatory of initiatives destined to die under eternal discussions in opinion forums. Even industry events have become a showcase for the repetition of the same ideas, eloquently expressed by the same actors, of whom I fear I am one. Why should this initiative be different? What elements guarantee that it will not become another of the committees that have had little impact on our industry?

There is no single answer, but after several lessons learned, we have generated a series of premises in the operation of this ecosystem, and the association by the main actors in the digital transformation of health.

The transformation is gradual. For years we have wanted to take the country from 0 to 100 in adopting best practices in interoperability, data management policies, and collaboration; however, we forget that Rome was not built in a single day and that the intermediate steps are critical along the way to change. A success story in Mexico is the electronic invoice, and I think it is worth looking back at its experience. It was not born overnight; it started with printed invoices, slowly evolved to invoices printed with two-dimensional pages, and over a period of 20 years has evolved into different versions that now allow the authorities full fiscal control of the country's financial operations. If someone 20 years ago had wanted to implement by mandate the version that we use today, we would be talking in this column about a failure of the Mexican authorities.

Agility is the key. We've all attended conferences where great speakers provide the secret recipe for digital health adoption, and I believe they all share the same components for success. However, few players have executed any of these practices and have encountered and overcome the challenges of their local reality. We have set out more to validate than to theorize. We know that nothing will be perfect at the beginning, but in the first step and with the mistakes made, we learn more than in hundreds of masterful plenaries given by industry scholars, which leads me to the next point.

Share knowledge. It is no coincidence that this point is part of the index of the digital health adoption model for the Pan American Health Organization. If we can have all partners learn from each one of their mistakes, we can smooth the adoption curve of any implementation. This is particularly difficult to achieve in a culture where the first step before any business relationship is to demand an NDA, with penalty clauses on the intellectual rights of even the ideas expressed. Still, in this partnership, we seek to see the value as a whole over the individual.

Win-Win. Any basic business book will tell you that if there is no value for everyone involved in a project, it is destined to fail. That is why the basis of this initiative was the generation of new monetization lines for its affiliates, the creation of new commercial opportunities, and new joint products based on shared data. In this way, any associate can be sure from the moment they join that the value will be subjective and supported by their cash flow.