Meet the champions

Laura worked on the development of ICTs aimed to improve mental health in different countries, languages and cultures. She created collaborative research partnerships between Australia, Europe and Colombia. She established a Colombian eMental Health research line, awarded PI and Co-PI of national and international projects. During the pandemic, she designed, implemented and led a technology based emotional support platform that have done more than 2000 free sessions over the past 6 months.

Laura has been actively involved in the design, research and development of several technological solutions to better assist young people to manage their mental health and wellbeing. Currently, her research focuses on the design, translation and cultural adaptation of mental health ICTs into Low-and-Middle Income Countries. She has expertise using participatory design methodologies, involving end users at all stages of the process from design to implementation.

Laura entered digital health (DH) with her PhD in 2014. She understands the potential of DH to reduce mental health treatment gap. Technology gives care the chance to reach individuals jumping service barriers and reducing stigma. People living in LMIC and non-English speakers experience more health and digital inequities. Her ambition is to create of DH solutions that can be adapted; utilized everywhere by making a rational use of resources and always involving end users.

Laura believes that pandemic brought awareness to digital health to people, including women. She thinks now it’s time to show women behind successful initiatives that have helped during this difficult time. It’s also important to connect women of all related disciplines and to establish easily accessible collaborative networks and spaces, where interested woman can join, share experiences and get academic support and training. Through collaborative partnerships promote and create initiatives to attract more funding and as such build and support employment.

Lucía is the first nurse in Costa Rica to publish a bachelor's thesis on the topic of Tele-nursing (2015). She also published her thesis in the journal of the Catholic University of Uruguay (2015). She has been a member of the Computer Nursing Commission of the College of Nurses of Costa Rica since 2017.
She is an Ad Honorem Collaborator of the College of Nursing of Costa Rica (2020) for revision of the Tele-nursing protocol during COVID-19 emergency. She reviewed creation of a new professional profile of Tele-nurse to be able to apply it during a pandemic, created the Tele-nursing Protocol for continuity of care at home for postoperative patients. She has been nominated and won executive program scholarship on Technology Applied to the Healthcare Sector at the University of Chicago (2020). In addition, she was the first nurse in her country to be accepted to enter a computing specialty in Costa Rica, such as FUNDATEC's Data Science Specialty, obtaining a 100 as a final grade in the Mathematics for Computing course (2021). She obtained a scholarship from the MICIIT to study the Specialty of Data Analyst at Cenfotec University (2021). She worked on patient care by Tele-nursing throughout 2020-2021, and taught online clinical fields on 2020. Currently, she is a professor of University Clinical Simulation as a health learning methodology.

Lucía is a nurse with special interest in telehealth. She holds a diploma in Nurse informatics. She is interested in applying technology for the education of future professionals in nursing, the education of patients and their families and for the analysis of health data.

In 2012, Lucía read about how in Africa they used teleconsultation to be able to perform health interventions, as well as teaching people who wanted to provide nursing without university training. Because of the lack of health personnel on this continent, anyone interested in working on this service could learn through phone calls or virtual communications, ways to care for patients. This stunned her; she thought of the many people who could be given health education from a computer, a cell phone or even a landline. This inspired her, which later became her passion. Gradually, she became passionate about computer science and even decided to enter to study a software technician, she took some programming courses and realized that she is fascinated. Her current interest revolves around being able to prepare in data, AI and Machine Learning. She wants to give interpretation, validity and analysis to the data of hospital patients who only stay in a paper or digital file, but who are golden when it comes to future predictions for health.

Opening up jobs in several institutions in the country, as well as supporting the financing of studies with the support of leveling courses for those who would start from the basics. Also, Lucía believes that it is important to open up conversational spaces so that women do not feel intimidated from studying areas that are traditionally male dominant.

Marcela's achievements in digital health includes: 1.Implementing an acute myocardial infarction identification program in 63 Hospitals in Colombia and 45 in Mexico.
2. Implementing Tele-care program at home for older adults
3. Directing Tele-dermatology program

Marcela is a health professional with experience in 2 years of telemedicine for chronic patients (acute myocardial infarction). She is currently studying for her Master's degree in Telehealth and starting a business to help women who perform care activities to report in the home of the elderly. She wants to provide better care for these people with health technologies, as well as the development of tele habilitation programs.

Marcela believes that digital health is a fundamental tool for health professionals as well as for the population that does not live in major cities in her country. Everyday, she finds great advances in technology that allows us to increase accessibility for populations in need and to provide timely attention, avoiding long-term displacements such as costs. In addition, digital health allows us to perform health education, disease prevention and follow-up to medical recommendations, which empowers patients on the user side. She is more convinced everyday that digital health is a great tool to improve the health conditions of a population.