According to the Communication and Information Center in the Vice Presidency of Science, Technology and Knowledge-Based Economy, a joint meeting between Hossein Afshin, Vice President of Science, and Mohammad Reza Zafarghandi, Minister of Health, Treatment and Medical Education, was held today at the Ministry's premises.

At the beginning of this session, Afshin first addressed the close relationship between the two fields of science and technology and the health system and said: Knowledge-based industries have an acceptable track record in the health sector, but nevertheless, our assets are still not enough and need to be supplemented. Our goal is to improve the quality of knowledge-based products and strengthen the assets in this area.

He continued: One of the priority branches of artificial intelligence in the whole world is the health sector, and the capabilities of this field and at the same time its sensitivities in our country have made the health system one of the basic options in the issue of smartization. Therefore, in addressing this space, we must simultaneously consider the community, the people, and the stakeholders, namely the medical community.

The Vice President of Science stated that the research work on the "National Smart Health Services Referral System" project has been underway for several months and that a team is working to bring the ideas to fruition. He added: "The work will be done gradually and the role of the Vice Presidency in this program is to facilitate, and we are trying to establish a connection between the technological body and the health sector."

According to him, one of the most important parts is to diagnose at level one from the beginning so that we have less disease or at least early diagnosis that will also incur less cost.

Afshin stated that the development of artificial intelligence in the field of health has been entrusted to Tehran University of Medical Sciences by the Vice Presidency of Science, and clarified: Our goal with this action is to use all the knowledge capacities of the country to ultimately reach a plan from level one to level three, but the reality is that we have to reduce the complexity of the work to implement it. There is a statement that if you want a problem to remain unsolved and not reach an outcome and solution, make it bigger.

He continued: "Therefore, we decided to first look at the plan as a whole and first target a city and consider all levels of services for it, but ultimately we came to the conclusion that this method did not have much effect and we are only testing the plan by doing this. We then came to the idea of ​​looking at the plan comprehensively but moving step by step in implementation and introducing services to the network year by year, and as long as its infrastructure is provided, all services will be included in the network at once. This is an approach that we have on the agenda in the Vice Presidency of Science's office in all areas, and we believe that implementing a successful example will lead to the replication of that procedure in other sectors in the future."

The head of the National Elites Foundation noted: We have a number of prerequisites in the referral system, such as BI (business intelligence), which can be done independently; because with the arrival of the referral system, we need a number of infrastructure and business intelligence. This section is a small project that can later be included in the referral system.

In the end, this official noted again: Regarding the referral system, we need more research work to come up with a plan, of course, we must define steps along this path so that a section reaches an output at each stage.

It is worth mentioning that the "National Smart Referral System for Selected Health Services" presented in this meeting is a digital platform that manages and monitors timely referral of patients to high-cost-impact health services (such as heart surgery and cancer treatment) through smartization and automation, and by implementing this system, quick and easy access to these services is provided. In a sense, this system focuses on the optimal and smart management of costly and high-impact health services, which of course was criticized in this meeting; meaning that it is patient-centered and the first level, namely health, has been neglected and the services are not comprehensive enough. Finally, it was decided that the details of this plan will be reviewed and finalized in frequent meetings and in a joint committee between the Ministry of Health, Medical Education and the Vice Presidency of Science.