The future of healthcare: Giuseppe Arbia and the challenge of digital accessibility
Nel percorso formativo Il Futuro della Cura, la rivoluzione tecnologica viene analizzata anche attraverso la lente rigorosa della statistica. Secondo In the training course The Future of Healthcare, the technological revolution is also analysed through the rigorous lens of statistics. According to Giuseppe Arbia, full professor of Economic Statistics at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and director of the Alta Scuola di Economia e Management dei Sistemi Sanitari (Altems), artificial intelligence and telemedicine are not a distant future, but a present reality that requires new analytical tools to be governed without creating exclusions.
The dogma of measurement
Professor Arbia's starting point is a key principle of business and scientific organisation: in order to manage a complex phenomenon such as digital healthcare, it is essential to be able to quantify it: 'In order to understand and manage phenomena, we must first measure them. There is a famous saying by Deming [...] you cannot control, you cannot manage what you cannot measure." Precisely to meet this need, Altems has launched cutting-edge educational projects, including a training course on the application of AI to healthcare, which is set to evolve into a two-year master's degree.
Telemedicine: the risk of new inequalities
The advent of telemedicine offers an extraordinary opportunity to bring care closer to patients, but it hides a pitfall: the risk of increasing social and territorial distances: “Talking about telemedicine means that some individuals will have greater accessibility than others for various reasons, for example because connections are not the same across the country [...] or because there is a difference in digital literacy, for example between young people and the elderly”.
A precision map for accessibility
The research response to this challenge is an ambitious project cited by Arbia: the creation of a map of digital accessibility for the entire country. This is an unprecedented granular analysis, based on a grid of hexagons with a side length of only 12 metres. This tool will provide an accurate measure of IT and geographical accessibility to healthcare services, identifying with surgical precision the areas where action is needed to break down technological barriers. For Arbia, investing in measuring the accessibility of services is the top priority for the coming years, so that technology becomes a bridge rather than a wall.
