The computer system of the ges reform in chile: Ethnography of health governance devices

Abstract

In the last decades, computer technologies have been incorporated into health care systems, through the conformation of "healthcare networks" that must integrate different levels, institutions and agents. In Chile, the system of "Explicit Guarantees in Health" (GES) is linked to these modernizing reforms of the State, whose goal is to improve the efficiency of public spending. This work critically analyzes the development and implementation of the "Information System for the Management of Guarantees in Health" (SIGGES) incorporating methodologies from the Social Studies of Science and Technology, and proposing a "device ethnography" design. As main results, the evidence shows that this information technology has a central role in the stabilization of modernizing health policy, which places administrative management over the integrality of care: SIGGES acts as a mediator between multiple levels and agents in health to measure the productivity of the system, linked to financing, with which modifies clinical activities and processes of subjectivation, privileging curative benefits on preventive and promotion, pathologies GES on No-GES, and urban conglomerates on rural areas.