Context

In Colombia, access to high-quality healthcare isn’t just a cultural priority—it’s a right, fully enshrined in the country’s laws and constitution. With the tutela system, anyone in Colombia can file an injunction if they feel their constitutional rights are violated—which, once granted, results in an order they can take to their doctor or insurance provider, to enforce their accordance with the constitution and the court’s ruling. But in spite of this, significant health inequity still prevails throughout the country.

The Idea

Among other factors, judges in Colombia rely on medical relevance, case law from upper courts and social impact to decide on right-to-health tutela cases. Creating tools that could provide this information to judges in an efficient and easily-understood manner could greatly change the landscape of health tutelas - where decision-making is time-consuming and cumbersome.

About the Project

This is especially crucial in rapidly-changing environments, such as those caused during pandemics—where timely access to health information that has undergone scientific review and evaluation is essential, and where it’s important to consider the impact that providing a new service, drug, or technology can have on various social demographics.  By developing tools that help streamline and standardize these rulings, we see an opportunity to move closer to health equity for all. At this stage, we are looking at improving this process with a heatmap prototype developed by students at the University of the Andes, which leads us to the next steps in piloting this project. 

The heatmap prototype would allow judges access to scientifically reviewed information on specific diseases, social vulnerability information collected by the Colombian Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística (DANE) and legal precedent timelines examining the jurisprudence in health tutelas.

About the Team

GPEEL is partnering with the Access to Justice Design Lab (A2J DLab), which is an interdisciplinary and collaborative group led by the Faculties of Architecture and Design, Law and Engineering of the Universidad de los Andes.

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