Article written by Jacson Fressatto, maker of Robô Laura and president of Instituto Laura Fressatto

Health is a basic human need, assured by Brazilian Constitution, ruled and guided on science. Everyone has the right to receive the best regarding medical treatments. However, we know that technological and procedural advances are not implemented in  public health sector with the same speed as in private sector, precisely because of the rules of regulation and homologation. Although slowness is justifiable, some advances need to break the barrier of traditional homologation, becoming more agile in their implementations, without circumventing at any level the criteria of regulation and information security and ethics.

It is case of Artificial Intelligence for health. This is a modality in technology that has been advancing in health sector for more than a decade and that today starts to bring benefits, not only in the compilation of research data, but also as a resource for more assertive decision making.

Even with a more evident acceptance, with scale of usage and validation in its assertiveness, Artificial Intelligence for health is still a subject in development, both at the general academy and at experts' table. Its operational use still incites a lot of doubt about how and where to apply such technological resources of data analysis, since clear rules of security and data protection are not well detailed in legal texts, much less in the rules for processing this information. And this is not exclusive to Brazil: it is a global and rising agenda in recent years.

In addition, the immaturity of digital information and digitalization of processes (structured data for use in IA) is a barrier to the effective use on a large scale of solutions that treat health data (whether patient or health system) with artificial intelligence.

Looking at the restrictions, totally coherent in the adherence and development of all and any technology, what causes a great counter-argument is the fact that the use of Machine Learning algorithms in the analysis of health processes and procedures offers a speed in the common understandings and greatly improves the efficiency of the assistance teams and the assertiveness of the specialists, who have more time in management of care and not more in the reading and analysis of clustered numbers in the various sectors and data drives of patients and health institutions.

Since 2010, Robô Laura is in development and adjust to attend the hospital medical operation, with the purpose of enhancing the capacity, which is exclusively human, of diagnosis and care. In 2016, it went into operation in the first private hospital and since then, it has been present in dozens of institutions, and it is scientifically homologated its capacity to support the decision of medical and care teams, for all patients admitted, regardless of whether they are assisted in the ICU or not.

The partnership with the National Education and Research Network (RNP), through the Technological Cooperation Agreement (ACT) with the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI), is an advance aiming to ensure two main factors addressed so far as obstacles: 1) a secure data processing tool and 2) a high performance resource, accessible to public health. The goal of the partnership is to ensure that with the same speed, and perhaps for the first time in our country and worldwide, before the private sector, public health in Brazil has cutting-edge technology at its disposal, adding value to the work of professionals and generating optimization of resources for the sector that so much needs this type of attention.

My activism has always been to make democratic the use of artificial intelligence in the world, starting with our country. And, although this project started from a personal tragedy, with the death of my daughter in 2010, having developed this solution in the last 10 years and establishing this significant partnership with a federal organization - to homologate and bring the resource to all citizens, effectively pays every effort and tears used in this purpose of life.