The digital transformation of health requires close collaboration between health and IT staff. For this, it is not necessary that doctors, in addition to knowing how the human body works, know how to cure viruses from their computers. It is enough for a small group of people to develop a language and a common understanding of a series of topics related to health and the computer world. And it is key that they do so. In this way advances and solutions are possible that improve the lives of millions of people, who would not otherwise be possible to reach.

Collaboration Between Healthcare and Information Technology

In recent years, many opportunities have been created in the region to strengthen the profile of health informatics, such as the master’s programs at the Italian Hospital, in Argentina, at the Universidad del Bosque, in Colombia, or at the University of Chile.

Many of the most successful digital health implementation experiences come from collaborations between IT specialists and health personnel. An interesting example is that of the Seoul National University Hospital (SNUBH). When this hospital was created, in 2005, it was conceptualized as a hospital that would be born 100% digital. Due to communication problems between the health and IT teams, when the software that would enable the hospital to operate began to be developed, an executive decision was made that had important effects. With the purpose of optimizing the added value of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, pairs were created consisting of a doctor and a computer scientist. Each of them would be in charge of a task and would have to agree on how to implement the IT solution. Finally, the hospital was inaugurated in 2005 and was the first hospital outside the United States to achieve level 7 from the Health Information Management System Society (HIMS). You can learn more details about this experience in the following case study.

Challenges for Collaboration Between Computer Scientists and Health Personnel

Collaboration between these two profiles can be difficult, since the cultures can be very different: in the computer world, one of the best-known phrases is “move fast and break things,” by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. That is, innovation, “agile” prototyping and adjustment, and moving ahead of the competition are rewarded, even if the risks are not entirely well calculated. There are many examples of what can go wrong when adopting this culture, for example, in the use of artificial intelligence, which has led well-known names in the industry, such as Elon Musk, to even call for a pause in the rapid advance in the use of this technology due to its accelerated pace.

On the contrary, in the world of health things move at a different pace. Innovations must be carefully tested before being included in health protocols. “Breaking things” can result in harming the health or losing the life of a patient. There are several identified causes, for why the adoption of technology is slower in the health sector among the most important are, for example, that health professionals are very open among professional circles but very closed to outside people, hospitals usually operate with rigid rules that are difficult to change quickly, the difficulty in measuring benefits and the difficulty in carrying out small-scale controlled tests.

Discover the Code in Action Through Collaboration

As in many other areas, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the potential for collaboration between technology and health. For example, artificial intelligence was used to diagnose the presence of the virus, the risk of deterioration and to sequence the genetic code of the virus, including its possible variations with the use of artificial intelligence. This code is a message that is difficult to decipher without the use of technology, and thanks to joint work today we can read the message that is encoded in the chains of amino acids that make up, for example, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, Wuhan-Hu -1.

With this article, we want to draw attention to the important symbiosis that occurs when health knowledge achieves a fluid work dynamic with information technology. For this, we have hidden a message in the text that, to be resolved, requires close collaboration between these two profiles.

Update: For two weeks we kept the contest open through a form where you could submit your solution. As we already have the winners (see Terms and Conditions here), below is the step-by-step answer.

Step 1. This is the easiest step, and almost everyone guessed it. The bold letters in paragraph 2 read “see page 7.” The page is the document linked in this same paragraph.

On page 7 you can see a very particular image that has 8 rows:

Step 2. This image represents a binary code of ASCII characters.

Binary code

00110011 00110100 10110000 00110000 00110010 00100111 00110010 00110110 00101110 00110010 00100010 01001110 00100000 00110001 00110001 00111000 10110000 00110001 00110101 00100111 00110100 00111000 00101110 00110101 00100010 01010111

If you translate it manually or with an online tool you get the following:

3

4

°

0

2

‘

2

6

.

2

‘’

N

1

1

8

°

1

5

‘

4

8

.

5

‘’

IN

from

34°02’26.2″N 118°15’48.5″W

Which represents a latitude and longitude.

Step 3. If you enter the longitude and latitude in Google Maps you will get to this image:

Step 4. However, on page 7 of the initial document, there is another strange element. The graph has a source and this source has a question mark in the page number:

If you click on the link, you can see a second document, and on page 15 of this document, there is the following image:

The last paragraph of the blog talks about the solution being read in the amino acid chains of COVID-19. The image on page 5 contains a line with the text: orf1ab 25 71 59 71 50 42 39

If one searches on the internet, Orf1ab corresponds to a section of COVID-19 DNA. This section, like any DNA chain, is made up of amino acids. Each amino acid in this chain has a letter that corresponds to it. For example, in place 25 of the chain, there is an amino acid (aspartic acid) that corresponds to the letter d, in place 71, there is an amino acid that corresponds to the letter i, etc.

The amino acid codes of the orf1ab section of COVID-19 can be seen in a viewer like this:

https://www.snapgene.com/plasmids/coronavirus_resources/SARS-CoV-2_(COVID-19)_Genome

And the final result reads:

25	71	59	71	50	42	39
d	i	g	i	t	a	l

The final answer is the word “digital.”

Thank you very much to everyone who participated!